Wandering the plain of spirits

There are three Unesco World Heritage sites in Laos - the Plain of Jars, Luang Prabang and the Vat Phou temple complex. All have existed for thousands of years, but the Plain of Jars, sprawling across broad, flat Xieng Khouang, is the most captivating.

The famous jars - most made of sandstone and ranging in height from one to more than three metres - spread out in the thousands like a terrestrial constellation.

A local guide tells us that jars have been found at more than 60 sites around Xieng Khouang, only three of which are open to visitors, including the largest find, known as Site 1, near the town of Phonsavan.

The Plain of Jars is well known as both a fascinating archaeological phenomenon and as a testament to the devastation of America's war in Vietnam.

What is less known is the region's importance in Thai history. This was the battlefield where the Siamese troops of King Rama V fought the Chinese guerrillas known as the Hor. From 1874 to 1887 the Hor tried repeatedly to invade Luang Prabang, which was under Siam's protection.

The guerrillas had fled China after the Qing royal government finally crushed the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64.

The history of the Plain of Jars is, of course, far older. Archaeologists believe the Mon Khmer were here at least 3,000 years ago.

There were burned human bones, beads and utensils in and beneath the jars in 1884 when James Fitzroy McCarthy visited. The Briton went on to become the first director of the Royal Siam Survey Department and was given the title Phra Wipakpuwadol.

In the 1930s, researchers from the Ecole Francais d'Extreme Orient, led by Madeleine Colani, found human remains in a small cave near the plain. The cave is now believed to have been a crematorium, and that the ashes were placed in the jars as part of the funeral rites.

Thai archaeologist Sujit Wongthes thinks the jars had a key role in the megalith culture that developed in Southeast Asia at the same time it was spreading across Europe and the Americas.

Evidence of this - rough-hewn monumental structures - can be found all around mainland Southeast Asia, but especially in Laos' Huaphan province and the Thai Northeast and North.

In Laotian legend, the stone jars were for brewing and storing rice wine. Khun Cheung, the great warrior of prehistory believed to have been of the Khamu (Kammu or Kha) tribe, as the Mon-Khmer were known, ordered the vessels made to celebrate a battle victory on the plain.

Around 1873 the Kha rebelled for independence, reasoning that they had accumulated the power necessary for self-rule from drinking the magic water in Khun Cheung's jars.

Next the Chinese Hor made the plain their base, and then in 1893 France absorbed the whole territory into its Indochina "protectorate". When the French left in 1954 and the Americans moved in, Xieng Khouang was alternately occupied by the communist Pathet Lao and Major General Vang Pao's Hmong "secret army", trained by American CIA agents. The Plain of Jars' proximity to North Vietnam made it strategically crucial. 

It is estimated that, between 1964 and 1973, a half-million American B-52 sorties against communist positions dropped a quarter of a billion tonnes of bombs on Laos. Most of these flights originated at the US airbase in Udon Thani.

Some 300,000 tonnes of ordnance fell on the Plain of Jars, a figure from which it's been extrapolated that a bomb could have exploded every eight minutes throughout the nine-year air war.

The entire town of Kieng Khouang was flattened, and of course countless ancient jars were disintegrated or left in shards.

No one outside the Pentagon, the White House and Laos knew about the bombardment at the time. The US Congress had expressly forbidden combat to extend beyond Vietnam's borders. Eventually President Richard Nixon's "secret war" in Laos and Cambodia was uncovered.

The legacy of that destruction lives on in the unexploded bombs still buried around Xieng Khouang. International efforts to make the area safe have been ongoing since 2004, but there is still a danger, with wide areas marked out with warning signs.

It was, and still is, a battlefield.

Nithinand Yorsaengrat

The Nation