Vientiane: Transformations of a Lao Landscape (review)

Vientiane: Transformations of a Lao Landscape is an antidote to common depictions of Laos as a marginal rural autarchy and its capital as a ‘colonial backwater’. It is the first sustained examination of this central ‘urban’ Lao space and succeeds in conveying the rich and turbulent history that has shaped it. Although the authors do not profess to have discovered any new material about the city, they have achieved a synthesis of the main English, French, Thai and Lao sources with the exception of manuscripts seized by the Siamese and still held privately in Bangkok and some colonial material held in Hanoi (p. 6). A series of maps throughout the book detail the historical transformation in the shape and size of the city. Notable photographs in the book include a fascinating aerial shot of Vientiane in 1929 and a picture of the White Rose Nightclub in 1969, infamous for its American era prostitution, complete with copulating dogs at the front entrance. The book consists of a re-examination of the elite-centred history of the pre-modern kingdoms, and the impact of French colonialism, the Cold War and socialist revolution on the twentieth century re-development of the city.

The authors view the city through the heuristic device of ‘landscape’ — the physical manifestation of its natural, cultural and economic environment — and use it to tell a story of political and social change. The focus on landscape brings to life much of the city’s architecture explaining the origins and fate of the old royal city walls, the French colonial treasury and the Soviet circus, to name but a few. It also allows the authors to examine the importance of the (now Thai) West bank of the Mekong River, which, in its heyday, was part of a greater Vientiane and included the city’s port and a major religious centre (p. 38). The physical character of the old city is brought to life in fascinating detail in the early chapters of the book, which recount the production and role of urban artefacts such as relic monuments and Buddha images in attempts by various kings to assert their regional political authority. The emphasis on landscape also allows a refreshing reconceptualization of the usual story of the conquests of ‘great kings’ and illuminates their transience and subordination to changes outside of their control. Pre-colonial urbanism ended in the destruction of Vientiane by a Siamese army in 1828 sent to quell the rebellion of the Lao king, Anuvong.

The attempt to rescue Vientiane from the ‘essentialized trope of bucolic backwardness’ (p. 3) that has shaped external perceptions of it since 1828 is at once the strength and central tension in the book. The authors assess the city through the historical lens of the pre-colonial political polity — the meuang. In the Foreword, senior Laos historian Martin Stuart-Fox suggests that there is something ‘quintessentially Lao’ about the politics of the meuang (p. xix) despite the fact that it was always part of a broader pre-colonial political spectrum incorporating kingdoms only recently constrained to the Thai, Burmese, and Lao geospaces. Meuang were hierarchical social spaces centred on urban seats of power that enjoyed shifting dominance over other meuang and their transient populations. It could be argued that the meuang is being reinvented in contemporary civilizational discourse as the historically specific ‘Lao’ polity of the nationalist imagination. However, this should not allow us to confuse the shifting regional social hierarchy of the pre-colonial polity with the dramatically fixed geopolitical formation that emerged in the colonial era as modern ‘Laos’ centred around the capital, Vientiane.

The key tension in the book is between the authors’ desire to chart the historical continuity of the meuang and the dramatic discontinuities that have made Vientiane what it is today. They argue that the political struggle (and ultimate defeat) of King Anuvong was an attempt to ‘assert meuang identity’ (p. 70) and in the continued ritual worship of the That Luang stupa by monks in the years...