47 Fun Facts About Laos

What is the capital and most populous city of Laos?

Vientiane. A Siamese army destroyed the city in 1827-28, and it recovered its standing only when the French made it their administrative capital in 1899.

Laos holds what distinction among the countries of Southeast Asia?

The only landlocked one. Five countries enclose it, and for centuries its stronger neighbours fought over it, leaving Laos a buffer between them.

In the Lao baci ceremony, held for weddings, births and farewells, what is tied around each guest's wrists?

Cotton strings. Each knot is meant to hold the body's 32 guardian spirits in place, and the rite matters so much in Laos that it is performed at state ceremonies too.

What does the name of the historic Lao kingdom Lan Xang mean?

A million elephants. Its founder Fa Ngum, said to have grown up in exile at the Khmer court, marched home at the head of a Khmer army and took the throne in 1353.

What happened to the kingdom of Lan Xang in the early 1700s?

Dynastic break-up. Pretenders fought over the throne until the realm split into rival kingdoms, and within a few generations the weakened successor states had become vassals of Siam.

Air America, the airline that flew supplies during the 'Secret War' in Laos, was covertly owned by which organisation?

The CIA. Bought in 1950 as Civil Air Transport and renamed in 1959, it looked like an ordinary airline while its crews carried arms and supplies for covert operations.

Which Lao vassal king rebelled unsuccessfully against Siam in the 1820s and died a captive in Bangkok?

Anouvong. Siam destroyed his capital and carried off its people, yet Laos now honours the defeated king with a riverside park and a towering bronze statue.

Laos was unified under Paris's rule in 1893 as part of which colonial federation?

French Indochina. France won the territory by gunboat: in 1893 its warships blockaded Bangkok until Siam signed away its lands east of the Mekong.

Which city hosted the conference where 14 nations pledged in 1962 to respect the neutrality of Laos?

Geneva. All fourteen governments signed, but North Vietnam kept thousands of troops in the country and American bombing soon followed, so the neutrality held only on paper.

Which communist movement fought the Royal Lao government in the 1959–1975 civil war?

Pathet Lao. The name means 'Lao Nation', and its public face was royal: Souphanouvong, the 'Red Prince', whose own half-brother led the government he was fighting.

Who became the first sitting US president to visit Laos, where America dropped over two million tons of bombs?

Barack Obama. Speaking there in 2016, he said the tonnage exceeded what fell on Germany and Japan together in World War II, and he doubled US funding for clearing what never exploded.

About 80 million of which US weapons dropped on Laos failed to explode and remain in its soil?

Cluster bomblets. Some 270 million were scattered over the country and nearly a third never went off; in the 2020s they were still killing or maiming dozens of people a year, most of them children.

US bombing of Laos aimed to deny the North Vietnamese the use of which supply route through the country?

The Ho Chi Minh Trail. Footpaths that had crossed the mountains for centuries were built up by North Vietnam into a garrisoned network of roads able to carry truck convoys.

At Boun Bang Fai, held in Laos just before the monsoon, villagers compete to launch what into the sky?

Homemade rockets. They are fired skyward to remind Phaya Thaen, the god of rain, to send the monsoon in time for the planting season.

Who led the Lao People's Revolutionary Party from 1955 and became the country's de facto leader in 1975?

Kaysone Phomvihane. The son of a Vietnamese father, he was recruited by Vietnam's communists as a law student in Hanoi and then ran a party whose very existence was kept secret.

Which ethnic minority, many of whom had fought alongside the Americans, fled Laos in large numbers after 1975?

Hmong. Their US-backed guerrilla army had held the northern mountains for years; when the communists won, General Vang Pao was airlifted out and many of his people followed him into exile.

Which energy export, bought mostly by one neighbour, was for years the biggest foreign-currency earner for Laos?

Hydropower. Dams such as Nam Ngum were built to sell their surplus across the border, and Laos still sends about three-quarters of the electricity it generates abroad.

The khaen, whose music UNESCO lists as Lao heritage, is a mouth organ with pipes made of what?

Bamboo. Each pipe holds a small metal reed, and at village festivals listeners are expected to join the singing and dancing rather than simply watch.

The Khone Falls in southern Laos hold which world record?

Widest waterfall. The cascades spread across about 10 km of channels and stop all shipping on the Mekong, so the French built a small railway across two islands to carry cargo past them.

The name Luang Prabang means what?

Royal Buddha Image. The name honours the Phra Bang, a Buddha statue said to have been given to the kingdom's founder in the 1350s and long treasured as a symbol of the right to rule the Lao.

Phra Lak Phra Lam, the national epic of Laos, is a retelling of which ancient Indian story?

The Ramayana. Its episodes became the stock of Lao court dance drama, and the title puts the hero's brother first: Phra Lak is Lakshmana and Phra Lam is Rama.

French archaeologist Madeleine Colani concluded in the 1930s that the stone vessels of the Plain of Jars were linked to what?

Burial practices. Later digs found human remains and grave goods beside the jars, more than 2,000 of them carved by an Iron Age people who then vanished from the record.

Pha That Luang, the gold-covered stupa in the capital, was ordered built in 1566 by which king?

Setthathirat. His stupa was wrecked when a Siamese army sacked the city in 1828 and lay in ruins for generations, until it was rebuilt under French rule.

The middle stripe of the Lao flag is which colour?

Blue. The band stands for prosperity and the red ones for blood shed in the fight for independence; the design was a party flag until 1975, when it replaced the royal banner.

What is the currency of Laos?

Kip. It replaced the French colonial piastre in the 1950s, when the single currency that Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam had shared was split into the kip, the riel and the dong.

Which branch of Buddhism, also dominant in Cambodia, do most people in Laos follow?

Theravada. In Laos it is blended with a belief in spirits, and villagers who go to the temple also make offerings to the guardian spirits of house and village.

The Lao language is closely related to and mutually intelligible with which neighbouring language?

Thai. Across the Mekong in north-eastern Thailand people speak Isan, which linguists count as Lao, so the river has long joined its two banks more than it has divided them.

The first bridge over the lower Mekong, opened at the Lao capital in 1994, was paid for by which country?

Australia. It gave about A$42 million in aid for the Friendship Bridge, where traffic has to switch sides of the road, because Laos drives on the right and its neighbour on the left.

Which large forest mammal of the mountains along Laos's eastern border was unknown to science until the 1990s?

Saola. A survey team first met it in 1992 as a pair of long, pointed horns found in a hunter's home, and it proved so unlike its relatives that it was given a genus of its own.

Laab, the Lao minced-meat salad, is traditionally seasoned with lime, fish sauce, herbs and what?

Roasted ground rice. Raw grains are toasted in a dry pan until brown and then pounded to a coarse powder, which is stirred through the meat just before serving.

Beerlao, the best-known beer in Laos, is brewed from which locally grown grain?

Jasmine rice. The malt, hops and yeast are imported from Europe, and the brewery itself began as a French-Lao venture in 1973 before the new communist state took it over.

Muay Lao, a traditional martial art of Laos, is a form of what?

Kickboxing. Fighters strike with fists, feet, knees and elbows, and the art is traced back to the 15th century, when soldiers of the old Lao kingdom are said to have used it in battle.

Which staple food, eaten with the fingers and dipped into soups and sauces, accompanies almost every meal in Laos?

Sticky rice. Its high starch content means it has to be steamed rather than boiled, and a taste for it is often called the essence of being Lao.

Northern Laos lies within which notorious opium-growing region of Southeast Asia?

The Golden Triangle. Its poppy fields spread as the world's demand for heroin grew, and in the mid-1990s Laos still ranked as the third-largest producer of illicit opium.

The capital's Patuxai monument is nicknamed the local version of which Paris landmark?

The Arc de Triomphe. Patuxai was built in the 1960s with cement the United States had donated for a new airfield, which earned it the nickname 'the vertical runway'.

The capital's Haw Phra Kaew temple once housed which famous statue, now in Bangkok?

The Emerald Buddha. It is carved from green stone, not emerald, and the Siamese general who carried it off in the 1770s went on to found the dynasty that still guards it.

Under French rule, which group made up most of the people in Laos's main towns by 1943?

Vietnamese. France brought them in to staff the civil service and the militia, and by 1943 they numbered about 30,000 of the 51,000 people in the six chief towns.

Vang Vieng, the backpacker town north of the capital, is famous for what kind of landscape?

Karst. Its limestone cliffs and river made it a notorious party stop for tube-riding backpackers, until the riverside bars were shut down after more than twenty travellers had died in a single year.

Dearest Sister, the first film Laos ever submitted for an Oscar, in 2017, belongs to which genre?

Horror. Laos set up its first Oscar selection committee to enter this ghost story, in which a woman who is losing her sight starts hearing spirits who pass on lucky numbers.

Which country was Laos's biggest foreign investor by 2016?

China. By then it had put more money into Laos than Thailand or Vietnam, and in 2021 a Chinese-backed railway opened from its own border to the Lao capital.

Laos long sorted its many peoples into Lao Loum, Lao Theung and Lao Sung, three groups named for what?

Their altitude. Lowland, mid-slope and hilltop: the mid-slope peoples are thought to have been there first, and the lowland Lao who now form the majority began arriving from the north about a thousand years ago.

Which regional bloc did Laos join in 1997, alongside Myanmar?

ASEAN. Cambodia was due to join with them, but a coup in Phnom Penh a few weeks earlier kept it out for another two years.

Which mountains form most of Laos's eastern border with Vietnam?

Annamite. The range walls Laos off from the coast, which is why travel and trade have always flowed more easily westward across the Mekong than east over the passes.

Who was the last king of Laos, forced to abdicate when the communists took power in 1975?

Savang Vatthana. He reigned for sixteen years without ever being crowned, and after the takeover he was sent to a prison camp in the north of Laos, where he died.

By Lao tradition, almost every young man was expected to spend a period of his life as what?

A monk. The stay could be as short as the three-month rains retreat, and families prized it because a son's time in the robes was believed to earn great merit for his parents.

Which southern plateau, known for its waterfalls, is the centre of coffee growing in Laos?

Bolaven. The plateau is an old lava flow with the heaviest rainfall in Laos, and French planters put its rich soil to work growing coffee in the early 1900s.

Roughly how long was the first railway linking Laos to another country, opened in 2009?

4 km. France never built Laos a rail network, so the country's first international line was just a short spur running off a Mekong bridge to a station outside the capital.