The Jewel of Laos

Distinctive architectural styles can be seen around Luang Prabang.

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Unlike the royal family that inhabited it, the palace survived the 1975 Communist revolution. A year later, the royal home was turned into the National Museum. Begun by King Sisavang Vong in 1904, the palace wasn't completed until 1909, with the later addition of two wings and a traditional Lao tiled roof.

Built by Vietnamese labor, embellished by Thai artisans, and funded by colonial authorities, the Royal palace is in a way a symbol of Laos, a country long occupied by foreigners. Khmer in style, the building was actually constructed and designed by the French as a way to keep control of the royal family. Beneath the symbols of Lao royalty in the entrance, two French lilies indicate colonial influence.

Today the palace is the home of the Pra Bang, the 83-cm gold statue of the Buddha that gives the town its name. (Most people say it's a replica, though, and the original is either in Vientaine or Moscow.) Brought to Cambodia in the 11th century from Ceylon, the statue is thought to have been cast in the 1st century in Sri Lanka. To legitimize Lao sovereignty, it was given in 1359 by Khmer ruler Phaya Sirichantha to King Fa Ngum, founder of Lan Xang, the Kingdom of the Million Elephants.

French Colonial Architecture
As pre-colonial non-religious structures were built with wood, no secular buildings still exist from those periods. When the French first came to Luang Prabang in 1864, they used the fired brick and ceramic roof tile previously reserved for the wats to build their homes and administration buildings.

An 1866 survey revealed that the Mekong, impassable during the dry season, would not serve as a trade conduit to Vietnam as they had hoped, and therefore Luang Prabang never became very important to the French. Even in 1940, only 600 expatriates lived in all of Laos.

Sparsely inhabited and little developed, even during colonization, Luang Prabang's French architecture rose up alongside the Laotian, and sometimes the two influenced each other.

The result was an array of white-washed colonial style edifices: houses with wrought iron balconies, hotels with large verandas, schools and administration buildings with black shutters and high ceilings. With many buildings refurbished as hotels and restaurants, even a bank, Luang Prabang has appropriated colonial architecture, maintaining an air of its recent past.