The division
After the death of Sourigna Vongsa in the 1690s, disputes over the succession broke the kingdom of Lan Xang apart. By 1713 there were three kingdoms: Luang Prabang in the north, around the old royal city; Vientiane in the centre, on the middle Mekong; and Champasak in the south. Each had its own royal line, and their rivalries invited intervention by their larger neighbours, Burma and Siam.
Under Siam
In 1779 a Siamese army under General Chakri, later King Rama I, took Vientiane, carried off the Emerald Buddha and the Phra Bang image, and made all three kingdoms tributaries of Siam. Siam settled large numbers of Lao people on the Khorat plateau, the region now called Isan, which today has more Lao speakers than Laos itself.
In 1826 King Anouvong of Vientiane, who had been raised at the Siamese court, rose against Siam and marched towards Bangkok. His army was defeated. In 1828 the Siamese captured Vientiane and destroyed the city, sparing only a few temples, and deported much of its population. Anouvong was taken to Bangkok, where he died in captivity. The kingdom of Vientiane ceased to exist, and Lao nationalists later remembered him as a hero.
The French
In the late nineteenth century France, established in Vietnam and Cambodia, claimed the lands east of the Mekong as former Vietnamese tributaries. In 1893, after an armed confrontation in which French gunboats forced the mouth of the Chao Phraya, Siam ceded the territory east of the Mekong to France. Further cessions in 1904 and 1907 added land on the west bank. The French organised Laos as part of French Indochina, with Luang Prabang as a protected kingdom and the rest under direct administration from Vientiane.
Afterwards
The king of Luang Prabang became king of a united Laos in 1946–47, and Laos became independent in 1953. The monarchy was abolished in 1975, when the communist Pathet Lao took power. Champasak's royal family continued to play a political role until then. Under French rule the court of Luang Prabang, especially in the long reign of Sisavang Vong from 1904 to 1959, preserved Lao Buddhist ritual and the town's many monasteries, and the old royal city was inscribed by UNESCO in 1995.
Further reading
- Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press, 1968
- Gombrich, Richard F. Theravada Buddhism: A Social History. Routledge, 2006
- Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
See also
- Lan Xang — Lan Xang, "a million elephants", was the Lao kingdom founded by Fa Ngum in 1353 on the middle Mekong, ruled from Luang Prabang and later Vientiane, which divided into three rival kingdoms in the early eighteenth century.
- Ayutthaya Kingdom — Ayutthaya was the Siamese kingdom ruled from the island city of that name on the Chao Phraya from 1351 until its destruction by a Burmese army in 1767, one of the great trading states and Theravada Buddhist kingdoms of mainland Southeast Asia.
- Wat Phra Kaew — Wat Phra Kaew is the royal temple within the Grand Palace in Bangkok, built by King Rama I from 1782 to house the Emerald Buddha, with galleries painted with the Ramakien, the Thai version of the Ramayana.
- Konbaung Dynasty — The Konbaung dynasty was the last royal house of Burma, founded by Alaungpaya in 1752, which reunited the country, sacked Ayutthaya, repelled Chinese invasions and expanded into Arakan, Manipur and Assam, before losing its kingdom to the British in three wars between 1824 and 1885.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.