Lao rebellion (1826–1828)

In 1707 the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang fragmented into rival kingdoms – Vientiane, Luang Prabang, and 5 years later into a third Champasak —- as a result of a dispute over the succession to the throne. The Kingdom of Vientiane was the strongest, with its influence extending across the Khorat Plateau (now in modern Thailand) and in conflict with the Kingdom of Luang Prabang for control of the Xieng Khouang Plateau (on the border of modern Vietnam).

Between the 1760s and 1770s, the neighboring kingdoms of Siam and Burma competed for alliances with the Lao kingdoms, due to the bitter rivalry and history of warfare between the two Southeast Asian powers. For both Siam and Burma, an alliance with the Lao would strengthened their position against their rival by increasing their own forces and denying them to the enemy. The use of competing alliances further militarized the conflict between the Lao kingdoms of Luang Prabang and Vientiane. If one of the Lao kingdoms formed an alliance with either Burma or Siam, the other would tend to support the opposite side. The network of alliances shifted repeatedly with the political and military landscape throughout the late eighteenth century.

The unrest which led to the Lao Rebellion can be attributed to changing political identities and the population transfers, the seizure of international trade which further isolated the Lao kingdoms, the loss of national prestige and cultural icons during the wars with Siam, massive conscription and corvee labor projects, and most importantly the policy of Rama III of implementing tattooing (the Siamese method of identification) on the ethnic Lao population in the Khorat Plateau.

Symbols and Identity

Haw Phra Kaew, Vientiane. Former Royal Temple of the Emerald Buddha.

The loss of the Emerald Buddha in 1779 became a symbol for the captivity of the Lao themselves. Important Buddha figures serve as protective symbols for the kingdoms of Southeast Asia. In 1558, King Setthathirath, one of the greatest kings of Lan Xang, had taken the Emerald Buddha from the Kingdom of Lanna, which he also ruled, and it was thereafter regarded as a protective religious figure for the Lao monarchy and the city of Vientiane. In the 1770s the Siamese needed royal regalia to reinforce the monarch's legitimacy along traditional cultural lines, since the Burmese had completely destroyed Ayutthaya and looted the palaces of everything worth taking. When Vientiane fell in 1779, the Siamese spared the city but took from the temples and palaces of anything which could help replace what they themselves had lost. However, the seizure of their religious iconography crystallized the Lao identity even more, and created a strong undercurrent of anti-Siamese resentment.

When Anouvong came to power, he ordered a replacement for the Emerald Buddha to be made, not only in Vientiane but also in Srichiangmai on the Khorat, Xieng Khouang, and later in Champasak. Anouvong also rebuilt and greatly enhanced the Haw Phra Kaew in Vientiane, the royal temple that had housed the Emerald Buddha before it was taken to Bangkok. His drawing continued attention to the loss of the Emerald Buddha clearly had political overtones.

Wat Sisaket, Vientiane. Completed by King Anouvong in 1824.

In 1779, following the fall of Vientiane by King Taksin's army, the city was looted but was spared destruction, the Emerald Buddha and several other important Buddha images were taken to Siam, the sons and daughter of King Siribunyasan were taken as hostages, along with several thousand Lao families who were resettled in Saraburi, north of the Siamese capital. King Siribunyasan had three sons, who were all to succeed him as king of Vientiane – Nanthasen, Inthavong, and Anouvong.

On the death of Siribunyasan in 1781, Siam allowed his eldest son, Nathasen, to return to Vientiane as king. He was permitted to take with him the Phra Bang, a gold Buddha statue which had originally been brought from Angkor by Fa Ngum, the first king of Lan Xang, and was taken to Siam in 1779. In 1791, Nanthasan convinced Rama I that King Anourouth of Luang Prabang was secretly meeting with the Burmese and plotting a rebellion against Siam. Nathasan was permitted to attack Luang Prabang and captured the city in 1792. The Luang Prabang royal family were all sent to Bangkok as prisoners and remained there for four years. Two years later, Nanthasan was himself accused of plotting a rebellion against Siam with the Lao governor of Nakhon Phanom, allegedly making diplomatic overtures to Vietnam. Nanthasen was arrested (and possibly executed) in 1794.

In 1795, Inthavong was installed as King of Vientiane, with his brother Anouvong assuming the traditional post of vice-king (Oupahat). Burmese armies invaded Siam in both 1797 and 1802, and Inthavong dispatched several Lao armies under Anouvong to assistant in the defense. Anouvong gained recognition for his bravery and won several major victories in the Sipsong Chau Tai.

Inthavong died in 1804, and Anouvong succeeded him the ruler of Vientiane. By 1813 he had begun a series of religious and symbolic acts which remain highly controversial. Anouvong called a great Buddhist council of the sangha, only the third held in Laotian history, and it was decided that a new Emerald Buddha would be carved. Anouvong ordered repairs on the Haw Phra Kaew, and also ordered several new temples to be established and dedicated to the Emerald Buddha. Bizarrely, he ordered a major bridge to be built across the wide Mekong River.

In 1819, Anouvong rushed to suppress a rebellion in Kingdom of Champasak, led by a charismatic monk who had caused the ruler to flee to Bangkok. Anouvong’s son Nyo led an army south from Vientiane and easily suppressed the uprising. Since the king of Champasak by then had died, King Rama II appointed Nyo as the new king of Champasak. Anouvong thus had succeeded in uniting two of the three Lao kingdoms under his control. Also that year, he ordered the construction of Wat Sisaket, which was completed in 1824. The temple was a major statement of his authority, as it was intentionally oriented so that when Anouvong’s vassals came to pledge their annual allegiance, they physically turned their backs on Bangkok.

Shrine to General Bodindecha, Thailand

By 1826, Anouvong was making military preparations for rebellion. His strategy involved three key points: 1) respond to the immediate crisis caused by the popular discontent over the forced tattooing; 2) remove the ethnic Lao on the Khorat Plateau to the Kingdom of Vientiane, conducting a scorched Earth policy as he did so to slow the inevitable Siamese pursuit; and 3) seek a diplomatic victory by gaining support from Vietnam, China or Britain.

Anouvong may have believed that the balance of power in Southeast Asia was turning away from Siam. The factionalism at the Siamese court, the presence of the British in nearby Burma, the growing influence of Vietnam in the Cambodian provinces, and the regional dissatisfaction in the Lao areas suggested that Siamese power was waning. In 1826, the British had arrived to finalize the Burney Treaty between Siam and the British Empire, and the presence of the British fleet may have led Anouvong to believe that an invasion was imminent. However, his most serious miscalculation was in the disparity of military power between Siam and Laos. From at least 1822, Siam had been purchasing large quantities of modern firearms and ammunition from Britain, which had a military surplus from the recently ended Napoleonic Wars.

In December 1826, Anouvong's rebellion began with an army of 10,000 men making its way toward Kalasin, following the path of the Siamese tattooing officials. In January, Anouvong led a second larger force towards Nakhon Ratchasima and was able to take the city by a ruse. A contingent of Anouvong's army was sent to Lomsak and Chaiyaphum, before making its way to Saraburi to bring the Lao families there back to Vientiane. A fourth army led by Anouvong's son Nyô, the King of Champasak, was dispatched to take Ubon. All of these armies moved under a web of misinformation and false dispatches that warned of impending attacks on Siam by neighbouring powers.

Anouvong's planned retreats were slowed by the civilians who occupied the roads and passes. Lao commanders also delayed to search for the Thai officials responsible for tattooing, forcing those captured to march north as prisoners. Anouvong wasted foolishly over a month searching for the governor of Nakhon Ratchasima, who had been a key figure in the tattooing and population transfers.

Victory Chedi, Wat Tung Sawang Chaiyaphum

To Anouvong's surprise, Siam quickly organized a massive counterstrike and dispatched two armies, one by way of Saraburi to retake Nakhon Ratchasima, and the other through the Pasak Valley towards Lomsak. Anouvong's forces withdrew to Nong Bua Lamphu, the strongest fortress on the Khorat Plateau and traditionally held by the crown prince of Vientiane. After a three-day battle, Nong Bua Lamphu finally fell, and Anouvong's men fell back to a second line of defence. Siamese strength and modern arms were greater than what Anouvong had imagined, and his armies continued to march towards Vientiane. They defended the city for five days, as Anouvong fled for his life towards the border with Vietnam.

Siamese general Phraya Ratchasuphawadi, later promoted to Chao Phraya Bodindecha, at last took Anouvong's capital city. He sacked the palaces and levelled the city's defences, but he left the monasteries and much of the city intact. Following the sacking of Vientiane, the rulers of Chiang Mai, Lampang, Lamphun, Nan, Phrae, and the kingdom of Luang Phrabang all pledged their renewed allegiance to Siam, although Phraya Bodindecha noted that they had “waited to see the turn of events, and their actions greatly depended on the outcome of the war.”

Bodindecha spent several months organizing the removal of the remaining people from around Vientiane and confiscating all arms and ammunition. He then left a small garrison across the river opposite the empty city and returned to the Khorat Plateau.

Anouvong eventually returned with about 1,000 soldiers and 100 Vietnamese observers. This small force was meant only to negotiate a settlement with Siam. However, he learned that a nine-spire stupa had been erected as a victory monument at Wat Thung Sawang Chaiyaphum (วัดทุ่งสว่างชัยภูมิ) in the town of Yasothon. This enraged him, and he crossed the Mekong and attacked the 300 Thai defenders, killing all but about 40. The now furious Rama III ordered Chao Phraya Bodindecha to return and completely destroy Vientiane, and to capture Anouvong at all costs.

Chao Phraya Bondindecha pursued Anouvong to Xieng Khouang, where according to some accounts he was betrayed by Chao Noy and handed over to the Siamese. Anouvong and his family were placed under heavy guard and marched to Bangkok. A British observer recalled:

[The king] was confined in a large iron cage exposed to a burning sun, and obliged to proclaim to everyone that the King of Siam was great and merciful, that he himself had committed a great error and deserved his present punishment. In this cage were placed with the prisoner, a large mortar to pound him in, a large boiler to boil him in, a hook to hang him by, and a sword to decapitate him; also a sharp-pointed spike for him to sit on. His children were sometimes put in along with him. He was a mild, respectable-looking, old grey-haired man, and did not live long to gratify his tormentors, death having put an end to his sufferings. His body was taken and hung in chains on the bank of the river, about two or three miles below Bangkok.

Buddha statues from Vientiane, damaged in the invasion

The city of Vientiane was totally destroyed and its population completely relocated. The destruction was so thorough that the first French explorers more than 30 years later found only ruins in a jungle to show where the city had once been. The remaining Lao kingdoms of Champasak and Luang Prabang understandably came under stricter control and arms limitations, while the Khorat Plateau was formally annexed by Siam. Regional rivals Siam and Vietnam would come into increasing conflict over control of the inland trade and Lao territory, leading to the Siamese-Vietnamese Wars of the 1830s. Vietnam annexed the Lao principality of Xieng Khouang, and Chinese bandits after the Taiping rebellion were able to force their way down the Mekong River to fight what became known as the Haw Wars of the 1860s. The first French explorers navigating the Mekong River used the political vacuum as a convenient excuse to create their own colony of French Indochina.

The most significant legacy of Anouvong's Lao Rebellion was the impact of the forced population transfers throughout the region. As a consequence of the warfare and population transfers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are now over 19 million ethnic Lao living in the Isan region of Thailand, while only 6 million live in the independent country of Laos. During the French colonial period, Vientiane was rebuilt as the Laotian capital in a deliberate attempt win favor and to demonstrate French authority.

Several accounts of the Siamese-Lao conflict have been written by historians and authorities, many in direct conflict with one another. In particular, the accounts of the Siamese heroines Thao Suranaree (or “Lady Mo”) and Khunying Boonleu have been popularized and possibly exaggerated. During the 1930s, Field Marshall Phibun promoted Siamese legends as part of a political and military campaign to unify all of the Tai peoples.

Similarly, the Lao and Isan-Lao stories of Anouvong and his son recall other legends. Unlikely as it seems, from the 1990s on the communist Pathet Lao have appropriated the story the Lao monarch's rebellion as a war of independence against Siamese cultural and political domination. In 2010 the communist government dedicated a large statue and surrounding gardens to King Anouvong.

• Anouvong
• Military history of Thailand
• Military history of Laos
• Laos–Thailand relations

Footnote

Citations

• Wyatt, David (2003). A Short History of Thailand. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300084757.
• Stuart-Fox, Martin (2008). Historical Dictionary of Laos. Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. ISBN 9780810856240.
• Ngaosyvathn, Mayoury; Pheuiphanh Ngaosyvathn (1998). Paths to Conflagration: Fifty Years of Diplomacy and Warfare in Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, 1778-1828. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0877277230.
• Simms, Peter; Sanda Simms (1999). The Kingdoms of Laos: Six Hundred Years of History. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. ISBN 9780700715312.
• Stuart-Fox, Martin (1998). The Lao Kingdom of Lan Xang: Rise and Decline. Bangkok, Thailand: White Lotus Press. ISBN 9748434338.
• Askew, Marc; William S. Logan; Colin Long (2007). Vientiane: Transformations of a Lao Landscape. New York, New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415596626.