by Jim Goodman
The Lao province of Xieng
Khouang lies northwest of Vientiane, bordering Vietnam’s Thanh Hoá province on
its eastern side. Most of it
consists of an elevated plateau of 1100 meters altitude, surrounded by largely
deforested hills rich in mineral deposits. Hmong and Khamu live in the hills, while Tai Phuan, Tai Dam
and Tai Daeng, along with Vietnamese and Chinese, live in the plains and
towns. Farmers grow rice and
vegetables, supplement their diet with hunting, fishing and gathering, raise
cattle and in many ways reflect the kind of lifestyle prevailing in the rest of
the country.
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| the Plain of Jars |
Two physical features,
however, distinguish Xieng Khouang from every other province in Laos. One is the presence of hundreds of big
stone jars on the plateau, called the Plain of Jars because of this phenomenon,
relics of a mysterious vanished Iron Age civilization. The other, a relatively recent
transformation, is the existence of thousands of bomb craters all over the
province, a legacy of the Vietnam War in the 60s and 70s.
A road does connect Vientiane
with Phonsavan, the provincial capital, and it has been improved in recent
years, but it’s still a long, grueling ride by bus. Twenty-one years ago, when I made my visit, the short,
inexpensive airplane ride was a more attractive alternative (and still
is). By taking the flight I soon
became acquainted with Xieng Khouang’s second outstanding feature—the
craters. They were everywhere, not
just around the populated areas, but also on hillsides, next to creeks, in
places where there was no possible target. It was if the bombs sought to destroy the water supply and
obliterate the pastures that fed the cattle.
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| Phonsavan girls |
Actually, there never was a
campaign specifically targeting the creeks and pastures. The objective was to disrupt the
funneling of supplies on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But often then pilots encountered thick clouds over the
Trail and couldn’t see any targets.
They had to return to Vientiane, but were not allowed to land with any
bombs still on board. So they just
dropped them over the last province en route, not really caring where they
fell, nor even bothering to find a worthy target. Thus the Xieng Khouang landscape is more pockmarked with
craters than anywhere else in Laos.
Even worse, the US dropped 262
million cluster bombs on Laos, a large proportion of them on the Plain of Jars,
and 80 million failed to explode—a permanent hazard to the population decades
after the war ended. Xieng
Khouang, along with Phong Saly and Hua Phan provinces to the north, were
longtime Pathet Lao strongholds.
And since guerrillas favored jungle bases, US planes also splattered the
province with herbicides and defoliants, while opposing forces on the plain
planted mines and launched rockets against each other.
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| young women in the market |
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| Hmong woman selling porcupine |
There are still lots of no-go
places in Xieng Khouang, where unexploded ordinance and leftover mines make
passage too dangerous. The
original capital was all but demolished by the war and a new one, Phonsavan,
now serves as capital and main commercial center. A town of about 35,000, it boasts a lively, interesting
market that, two decades ago, offered such unusual items as forest rodents,
deer, porcupine, wild chickens, jungle roots and tubers and opium poppies. Opium cultivation was still legal then
and small patches of poppies stood in the nearest villages. A few years later the government
outlawed the plant and nowadays you won’t find it for sale in the market. Practically everything else sold then
is still available, though perhaps fewer porcupines.
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| stone jars scattered on the plain |
Phonsavan is a quiet and
friendly town, but its only real lure is its proximity to the ancient stone
jars. The jars lie in several locations,
but some are in or close to no-go zones.
Three large and safe sites are south of the town and the easiest to
access. The jars, of sandstone and
other local stones, vary in height and diameter from one to three meters,
placed in no particular order, some cracked or split or fallen. None have lids, though they may have
originally had lids of perishable material.
Legends that the jars were
used to make rice liquor to celebrate an ancient conqueror’s victory and
theories that they were for smelting metals have been discarded in favor of a
general consensus that they were burial jars. Excavators have found fragments of teeth and human bones in
them. Puzzles remain, though, about the precise use of them as burial
jars. Were the corpses interred
there ad left to decay under a presumed lid? Were they cremated inside? Why are the jars so many different sizes, with too many
smaller ones to imply a great proportion of child deaths?
Even more nebulous is whatever
happened to the people who constructed them. The sites date to the Iron Age, about 500 BCE to 500 CE, but
whoever made them left no trace of cities, temples, building foundations of any
kind, artifacts or written records.
They simply disappeared and existing historical records for the area appear
only from the 11th century, when Tai Phuan migrated to the area from
further north. They became
Buddhists and established a state that was sometimes subjected to Luang
Phabang, sometimes independent, and prospered by being on a major trade route
north to Yunnan, east to the Vietnam coast, south to Cambodia and west to the
Mekong.
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| Site !, closest to Phonsavan |
It was also vulnerable to
invasion from all directions.
Vietnamese forces sacked it during the Tây Sơn Dynasty in the
late 18th century.
Siamese soldiers occupied Xieng Khouang in 1777, 1834 and 1875 and
forced large portions of its inhabitants to relocate to places under more
direct Siamese control. Not long
after this, Chinese Black Flag bandits, remnants of the suppressed Taiping
Revolt in southern China, attacked Xieng Khouang and destroyed its
temples. Things calmed down during
the Colonial Era, but after the Second World War ended, insurgency action commenced
and continued after the French departure, turning the province into a major
theater of hostilities until 1975.
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| Leftover war material serves as fenceposts. |
The war wrought incredible
damage on Xieng Khouang, completely destroying its capital, littering the area
with UXOs and killing off much of its vegetation. But with its conclusion people went back to a life more like
that of their grandparents’ time, before all the conflicts started. There were places they dare not tread
and maybe had to watch what they hoed, but they could carry on something
resembling a normal existence. They
even made use of some of the war’s detritus by using bomb canisters and
artillery shells as fence posts, flowerpots and hotel decorations.
Like the craters viewed from
the airplane window, the canisters walling off the vegetable patches were instant
reminders of Xieng Khouang’s turbulent past. Craters even marked the areas with the jars, like the one I
saw at Site 1, sign-posted “US Bomb #2” (my driver was unable to find out where
was US Bomb #1). But none of that
seemed to affect the local people’s attitude towards tourists, even Americans,
when Laos opened the province to foreigners in the early 90s. Like other newly opened Lao
destinations, Phonsavan was a Sabai di
City and travelers everywhere were greeted with smiles and welcomes. No one expressed any resentment about
the war damage. That was already
relegated to what seemed like a distant past; even more so now, two decades
later.
Phonsavan is most interesting
in the morning, when villagers arrive from beyond town to buy or sell things in
the open market. Merchants wheel
their products into town on wooden carts and use the latter to display their
goods. Women tend to dominate the
crowd and many dress in traditional clothing, like the embroidered sarongs worn
by the various Tai sub-groups.
Next to the town lies a lake at the foot of a couple of large, mostly
barren hills, with fancy wooden houses near the summit and cemeteries in
several locations on the slopes.
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| Phonsavan Buddhist temple |
You get good, broad views of
the town and the surrounding area from the top of this hill. Distant mountains rise more than a
thousand meters above the plain.
Some have caves where both guerrillas and local residents took refuge
during the bombing campaigns. The
caves didn’t automatically guarantee safety, though, and in one tragic instance
bombs sealed and destroyed a large cave sheltering a few hundred people, all of
whom died.
Xieng Khouang’s Buddhist Tai
Phuan are still the largest ethnic group in the area. They did not rebuild all the grand temples destroyed by 19th
and 20th century wars.
But post-war Phonsavan has its own modest temple, on stilts, as do Tai
Phuan villages in the vicinity, distinguishing them from settlements of the Tai
Dam and Tai Daeng, who are animist.
They are in roughly the same style as Therevada Buddhist temples
elsewhere in Laos, featuring angled, sloping, tiered roofs, thick supporting
posts and the typically carved shutters depicting kinarees and other celestial beings. By the time Xieng Khouang started receiving visitors the Lao
government had relaxed its former fiercely secular attitude and became more
tolerant of religious expression.
Buddhism thus made a comeback, monasteries once again filled with monks
and devotees resumed their religious customs, duties and the enthusiastic celebration
of their festivals.
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| rockets on display in Ban Sawn |
My own visit to the province
late in the month of May coincided with a rocket festival in the nearby Tai
Phuan village of Ban Sawn. My
driver to Jars Site 1 had informed me of it, scheduled for the next day. I arranged to get there early morning,
just as the villagers were erecting the scaffolds to launch the rockets. People from other villages participated
as well, bringing their own rockets and marching to Ban Sawn behind a file of
musicians playing gongs, drums and bamboo reed-pipes, dancing all the way, some
of the men carrying beer bottles full of strong rice liquor and taking
occasional swigs en route. Others
made the journey packed in the backs of pickup trucks.
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| monk conducting rituals iside the tent |
While some of the men upon
arrival immediately set out to choose a site to erect the launching scaffold
for their rockets, other people headed for the huge, silk saffron tent near the
center of the village. Inside the
tent monks carried out rituals for devotees to witness and join. A makeshift altar stood in the center
flanked by cases with shelves full of gifts from the faithful, textiles, betel
boxes, rice containers and money trees, spilling over to the sides of the
officiating monk, a rather young man distinguished by his elaborate red miter,
embellished with spangles and gold embroidery, with flaps down to his
shoulders.
Religious rites had been going
on since the official start of the festival two days earlier. The purpose of the festival is to bring
on the rainy season and it probably predates the arrival of Buddhism in the
area. It does not mark any
particularly Buddhist event, but for the Tai Phuan, like their cousins the Lao,
who also stage rocket festivals both in Laos and northeast Thailand,
essentially animist activities are endowed with a Buddhist veneer.
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| monk adding the fuel |
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| firing the rocket |
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| And the rocket soars to Heaven. |
Right after ignition, the
rocket blasts off spewing thick smoke and, barring misfire or accident, soars
into the heavens, reminding the gods it’s time to bestow the annual rains. Some of these rockets can fly right
past the clouds and continue for several kilometers before falling to
earth. Observes judge them by how
high and how far they reach, as well as by what kind of trail they leave across
the sky.
The launching is not without
risks. If the rocket fails to fire
it’s quite a loss of face for those who brought it. Even worse, it could streak off in the wrong direction, maybe
even into the crowd, rather than into the sky, causing casualties that rudely
reminded people of those other kinds of rockets from the 60s and 70s. And on the spiritual side, it would not
be sending signals to Heaven.
Such accidents are extremely
rare, fortunately, and the festival spirit is mostly celebratory. It has its rituals, but for the
villagers there’s always a good reason to make merit. They may not believe that their rockets really do bring on
the rains, but the event is full of entertainment and a good excuse for a
rousing round of revelry. After
all, when the rains do come it’s then the season of hard work and little
or no leisure. The Rocket Festival
is the last opportunity before that to have fun. It’s not surprising that it’s still as popular as ever.
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| revelers at the Rocket Festival |
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