hand-dug wells. The very shape of the vessels, with walls of a uniform thickness and exterior sides straight rather than curved, is ideal for keeping evaporation to a minimum. My feeling, one supported by absolutely no one else as far as I know, is that all the labour involved in making such containers points to a highly valuable crop, probably one requiring all the more help during the dry season because it’s one that matures only once a year. And I think we can guess what it might have been. When I visited the Plain of Jars, the local Hmong had finished the annual harvest of opium poppies only ninety days earlier, before the rains began.
The time before the rains was not always an easy abstraction to keep in mind when M and I were there, given the intensity of the sporadic downpours and their cumulative effect on the roads. On our way back from the site, we had to take shelter in a tall, narrow cave with three chimneys at the top that permitted narrow shafts of light to reach the floor, where several small Buddhist shrines had been erected. A nearby resident told us that during the American War, local people fled to this cave and one other whenever bombing raids began. Then the caves were themselves bombed. The number of people killed is a matter of dispute, to judge from the fact that everyone I asked had a different figure. But the locals swear that as late as the 1980s, a decade and a half after the incident, visitors still smelled the faint odour of dead bodies inside the cave.
Red mud, the sort familiar to readers of the memoirs that war has produced, kept us from driving to the second jars site, about twelve kilometres distant. But we got as close we could, and then hiked the rest of the way. So much heavy mud stuck to our shoes that I felt like an old-time deep-sea diver walking the ocean floor in leaden boots. My trousers were filthy, too. I considered rolling them up to the knee but had been told this was an open invitation to leeches. The mess would soon be worse: cross dark clouds seemed to be holding a council overhead.
This second site is higher up, smaller and more compact than the first, but no better preserved. Though a great many lie in pieces, the jars are found around the rims of craters. And yet on the same site I saw something that lifted my spirits. I found one ugly crater with a mature tree growing in it. Then I saw another. More than thirty years have passed and time has pushed on. At some level a new generation has forgotten the horror. Nature, it seems, is forgetting, too.
As for the Hmong, 3 million of them live in China and more than half a million in Vietnam. The lesser numbers elsewhere in Southeast Asia, including Burma, have never been counted accurately. All Hmong share a common language, but they are distinguished from one another by the dominant colours on their jackets and headdresses. Blue Hmong and White Hmong are numerous in Vietnam, for example. Those in Laos and Thailand are known as Green Hmong and can be divided further by their palette, and more importantly, by their politics.
Vietnam’s Hmong sided with the communists in the early 1960s, while those in Laos were recruited by the CIA. All had fearsome reputations as combatants. The anti-communist ones were officially paid by the rightist Lao government, but the money came from the United States, which also armed and trained them. When the military effort failed, thousands of Hmong fighters, rightly fearing for their lives, fled to the United States. As a result, the largest Hmong population outside Asia, about fifty-eight thousand people, is in Fresno, California, with several smaller enclaves elsewhere in the state. Minneapolis, of all places, has the highest concentration outside the west coast. In recent years, more and more have been allowed to immigrate to the United States.
The Hmong in Laos — the ones who take such exception to being lumped in with their relatives and friends who worked for the CIA — are hill people, like nearly all Asian Hmong, and generally keep to elevations above eight hundred metres — far above, if they can. They live by growing maize and sometimes opium by slash-and-burn methods, and by hunting. Every year on the Plain of Jars, Hmong are injured, maimed, or killed by UXO — unexploded ordnance — once dropped from American B-52s. The most common and deadliest of these leftovers are the fist-sized sachets of explosive once used in cluster bombs. Hmong hunters seek them out for the gunpowder they contain. Foreigners visiting the area are advised to stick closely to the narrow footpaths and hire a Hmong to lead the way, and then follow in the prints of his or her flip-flops.
— THE VIEW FROM PHU SI —
Everyone enjoys going to Luang Prabang, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and justifiably so. It is perhaps the best-preserved fully functioning ancient city in Southeast Asia. It sits, with a generalized air of gentle timelessness, perched along an especially beautiful stretch of the Mekong. Luang translates as Royal, as this small city (the population has merely doubled in the past century and a half) was the first seat of the original Lao Kingdom, the Lan Xang. That was in 1357. When the administrative functions were moved downstream to Vientiane in 1545, it became a sort of city-state while remaining part of the kingdom. But it became a kingdom in its own right in 1707 when the Lan Xang splintered into three parts. It held that position, with a couple of embarrassing interregna, until the Pathet Lao formed the present republic in 1975.
Northern Laos was one of the last pieces the French needed to complete their Indochina jigsaw puzzle. They hovered nearby as the puny kingdom was raided and robbed by the Burmese, the Siamese, and the Vietnamese. Then in 1887, the Pavillons Noirs came pouring down the Nam Pa, which flows into the Mekong from the east a few kilometres north of the city. The attack was so devastating that the king had to bargain with France for permanent protection. The French allowed the monarchy to remain, intact and essentially powerless, inside the palace (now a museum).
One of the first French initiatives in Luang Prabang was to put up a building called the Commissariat. In a city characterized by smallish two-storey hybrids (French brick at street level, Lao wood construction up above — most dating from the Postcard Age, with a few from the 1950s), this was a big structure indeed. These days it has been rebuilt beyond recognition and is the forty-room Phousi Hotel, where M and I were staying. It is just down the road from the Hmong market on Thanon Setthathilat, the long street distinguished by the sorts of businesses that Westerners favour: a foreign-language bookshop, a highly calorific bakery, an Internet café, and so on. There can be few such high streets in Southeast Asia less severely marred by tackiness and hucksterism.
Craft items are the main draw in the stalls at the Hmong market, particularly clothing and accessories. There are trousers and square tops made of hemp cloth, perpetuating traditional motifs in startlingly bright colours along with black. The batik work is of high quality, but then dyeing is a Hmong art form, as with indigo skirts (ones actually made by boiling the indigo plant) that are then decorated with red. All girls are taught needlework (paj ntaub, literally “flower cloth”) from an early age. By puberty they have already amassed the wardrobe that is to carry them along in married life. The Hmong are wild about elaborate hats and wide-strapped shoulder bags with mythological designs, both of which look rather Tibetan in character to Western eyes. They are also avid fans of jewellery, including finely made necklaces and bracelets fashioned from ropes of silver rings.
There were some staple foods for sale at the Hmong market, as well: rice of course, maize, cane, peanuts, green beans, squash, cucumbers, and an edible root called manioc. But the main farmers’ market is elsewhere and operates in the early mornings. It is an orderly assemblage of people buying what they need for the evening table. By contrast, the night market, down by the waterfront, is more Chinese in character, in that it’s jam-packed with sharp-elbowed bargain hunters straining their eyes under the strings of electric lights to determine, by feel and by smell, the best possible example of each species of fish while, at the same time, arguing or gossiping with everyone else in the crowd.
The city always has been and continues to be the spiritual centre of the country. Most of it sits on a thumb-shaped peninsula, in the middle of which is a single, large hill — in the circumstances, one might almost say a miniature mountain — called Phu Si. This is home to four of Luang Prabang’s thirty-three
