When the late Grant Evans discussed Lao origins when speaking on the dilemmas facing the field of Lao studies a few years ago, he cut right to the heart of this article when he argued that after fifty years, it was time to drop the Nanzhao thesis.Footnote 1 He was referring to the oft-repeated claim by Lao historians that the ancient kingdom of Nanzhao in modern-day Yunnan province was actually ruled by Lao and was the origin-point for their migration south.Footnote 2 But Evans knew well that decades ago scholars had shown that the kings of Nanzhao were Lolo people, not Lao.Footnote 3 This article examines the origins and significance of the Nanzhao thesis as Lao historians articulated it prior to 1975. However, one cannot simply analyse the Nanzhao thesis alone, but rather must consider an entire complex of interrelated and tightly-bound concepts that have been reformulated by Lao intellectuals over many years. My hypothesis is that Lao historians were not simply making claims to an ancient, little-known kingdom in southern China, but rather were engaging in complex cultural transitions by rewriting the hugely important nithan khun bulom story of the nineteenth century into the ‘birth of the Lao race’ narrative for a modern twentieth-century audience in order to imagine the new national identity through history. The newly written version, as I will show, was now in the spirit of a modern, scientific and racialist account of the Lao people that aligned with the new ethos of the period, namely, popular sovereignty, nationalism and Social Darwinism.
The nithan khun bulom proved fertile ground for elite nationalists to stake their claims. In extant versions from the nineteenth century,Footnote 4 this story told of the divine lineage of Lao rulers descended from Khun Bulom, who came from heaven to rule at Na Noi Oui Nu (ນານ້ອຍອ້ອຍໜູ) or Muang Thaeng, modern-day Dienbienphu.Footnote 5 This was followed by a narrow reciting of the kings of Lan Xang beginning with Khun Lo, the eldest son of Khun Bulom. Included with the nithan khun bulom was the famous gourd story, which told of the origins of the Lao people. In this story, the Lao and the KhaFootnote 6 were born from different holes of the gourd by which they came to have different physiognomies and customs, which explained ethnic diversity in Laos. Yet beginning in the 1920s, and especially during the independent Royal Lao Government (RLG) period (1953–75), Lao writers grew sceptical of this account and began to alter it.
To begin this profoundly modernist undertaking, first these writers had to remove the fantastic, unrealistic elements if they were to have a reliable, credible account of their history. This stage often included a review of existing literature and critique of textual sources with philological leanings to purge and purify the history of myths and legends.Footnote 7 Second, they replaced the fantastic with the historically verified: Heaven became China and Khun Bulom was remade as Pi-Lo-Ko, the eighth-century ruler of Nanzhao. Finally, often lacking the names of Lao persons to follow in the first historical epoch, they wrote instead of the birth of the anonymous, homogenous multitude they called the Lao xaat (ຊາດລາວ), which would be the collective protagonist for the period prior to Khun Bulom. The final product was a modern, scientific history of Lao racial origins reliant on the existing precolonial narrative of Khun Bulom's bloodline, which synecdochally mutated into the origin of all Lao people.Footnote 8
Yet why did the Lao elite become fixated on the ‘birth of the Lao race’ to such a degree? To put it simply, they viewed history as the key to knowing one's own xaat — race, nation — and further that this was crucial for nationalism to develop in Laos. Maha Sila Viravong may have put it best when he wrote that the ‘study of one's own chronicles is truly necessary and extremely important because strong and true patriotism comes from the study of the history, or chronicles, of one's own xaat’.Footnote 9 Echoing this sentiment, the diplomat Khamchan Pradit wrote: ‘I wish to give the youth a new model to know the greatness of the Lao xaat in Asia and [it] should continue to participate [in the same manner] in the future’.Footnote 10 Nationalism was the primary concern of the generation of writers to be examined. This account of the development of nationalism should be considered in contrast to those who have said that the country was simply ‘invented’ by the French in 1893 and that subsequent Lao nationalism amounted to nothing.Footnote 11 Observers such as MacAlister Brown and Joseph Zasloff perceived the country as little more than a collection of tribes, utterly devoid of nationalist sentiment.Footnote 12 This article will demonstrate that the Lao have long held strong nationalist views and that it is only due to historians’ studied ignorance of these views that they have been lost.
This study proposes to revise our understanding of Lao nationalism through the prism of race, instead of the more widely observed vector for nationalism: imagined communities, engendered by the dissemination of modern, nationally-oriented print media.Footnote 13 Few Lao publications appeared in the French colonial period, which has limited our understanding of Lao nationalism; however, we may perceive a longer, more significant progression if we instead consider the Lao elite's appropriation of race. As a result, Lao nationalist activity can be recognised before the Second World War — the Lao Nyai renovation movement — and significant connections can be made with precolonial history. The Lao did not suddenly become nationalists in the Vichy period, but slowly developed such notions in many stages, culminating with the RLG period. The literature on Lao nationalism has progressed from a preponderant concern with anticolonial struggle and the Japanese interregnum during the Second World War to recent investigations into pro-French imagined communities.Footnote 14 Simon Creak's study on Lao nationalism through notions of the body in sport sets a new standard in the field, not least because of its consummate skill with Lao sources.Footnote 15 To understand the rise of nationalism, the successful approach across the region has been to study the writings of the elite, along with newspapers and political parties, to reconstruct the intellectual and political history of the gestational stages of nationalism.
Until recently, little consideration has been given to the writings of elite intellectuals during the RLG period, who have largely been dismissed. Few scholars have as of yet made any study of the RLG elite's projects to instill patriotism in the people.Footnote 16 One such project was the production of new histories, seen as key to proper knowledge of one's own xaat. The rewriting of the nithan khun bulom then was critical to the formation of the new nationalism the elite wished to inculcate in the people at large. Earlier studies approached Lao history through an external lens, but recent studies on the elite during the colonial period reveal that there was in fact a Lao discourse on Lao.Footnote 17 The fact that this discourse did not develop in isolation from foreign influences does not mean it was inauthentic; rather it developed in a fashion similar to elsewhere in the region. I have attempted to trace how the discourse evolved in the independent period and shaped RLG culture and society in ways which were far more significant than has been fully acknowledged.
However, there is still a strong vein in the historiography of Lao nationalism which is problematic and must be addressed: this is the conceit that the country and ethnic identities were created by French colonisation.Footnote 18 Certainly it is important to recognise the major influence of the French, especially when dealing with a topic such as race, but to understand the development of Lao nationalism, more attention needs to be paid to the role of the elite. The French did not happen upon a tabula rasa in Laos. There were many pre-existing notions, including a conceit of ethnic identity, in addition to other more significant identifiers, which I argue became important precisely in the era of modernisation to follow, subtly guiding the transitions.Footnote 19 The French created a skeletal colonial machine in Laos, which in practice, left most people largely to themselves. Thus the Lao elite had a significant role to play as cultural brokers and translators. Lao understandings crucially determined the nuances of the modern term xaat.
The French were the first to write a Westernised version of Lao history, but this was not equivalent to the Lao elite's project to rewrite the nithan khun bulom. This began with Auguste Pavie's work to translate the text, bringing it to Western attention.Footnote 20 This was followed by many French histories of the new possession culminating in the work of Paul Le Boulanger.Footnote 21 The study of the nithan khun bulom has until now been treated separately from Lao nationalism, but this oversight is attributable to a false dichotomy between the ‘premodern’ and ‘modern’ periods. Michel Lorrillard and Souneth Phothisane have led scholarship on the text, but few others have taken an interest in it, and there has not yet been any study of the venerable text's role in the twentieth century.Footnote 22 For historians of Laos, the mythical chapters dealing with Khun Bulom and the gourd story are easily skipped over to get to the ‘literal’ history. By relegating this material to the dustbin of ‘myth and legend’ we have missed important writings, on the order of nationalist fantasies, by central Lao figures of the time when nationalism took hold in the country. The purpose of this article is to examine RLG elite writings in light of these considerations to advance our understanding of twentieth-century Lao nationalism.
The most relevant work to date on RLG histories has been Vatthana Pholsena's study of the historiography of early Lao history; however, she did not focus exclusively on the RLG period, but was more concerned with the directions of contemporary historiography in the country, rather than considering RLG works in their own right.Footnote 23 While the RLG history pamphlet Volker Grabowsky and Oliver Tappe studied did not consider the origins of the Lao, it did show how RLG leaders could manipulate history to promote patriotism.Footnote 24 Important connections to the colonial period were made by Ivarsson, who traced the elaboration of race in popular Lao histories as they appeared in Lao Nyai, which inform this study.Footnote 25 Ivarsson expanded his earlier analysis to a monograph, which led to new understandings of Lao–French collaborations, yet his treatment of Lao agency needs to be more balanced. On the other hand, Ivarsson and Christopher Goscha's pioneering study on Chao Phetsarath Ratanavongsa prefers to consider his ‘Greater Laos’ in spatial, not racial terms.Footnote 26 Most recently, Creak followed Francophile Lao who joined the French to revive the Lao race, a sentiment shared by both, but does not focus on Lao notions of race afterward.Footnote 27 The RLG's ethnocentrism has long been known, but its source has not been thoroughly examined; such a study could explain why RLG nationalism failed to attract enough support during the Vietnam War. Grant Evans had noted briefly the racial aspects of Sila's work, yet the present article shows that this trope was not limited to a single work or author, but was in fact widespread in the period, found across many writings.Footnote 28 Moreover, this article contributes to the foregoing discussions by arguing that the nationalism produced by RLG writers was more modernist and autonomous than previously recognised, but with curious links to the past.
Race in Laos
Laos was not isolated from world history in the course of these events. The transition to modernity at the opening of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of nationalism which ripped apart cosmopolitan empires in favour of states founded on distinct peoples. This was inextricably linked to popular sovereignty with a new racial science in the wings to produce requisite authoritative knowledge on the newly conceived ‘people’. The latter was a global phenomenon embraced by the masses and their leaders, including everyone from Theodore Roosevelt to Adolf Hitler to Sun Yat-Sen and Yan Fu of China, albeit for different reasons.Footnote 29 Intellectuals in colonial Vietnam were ‘enchanted by social Darwinist schemes’ and thus boasted of a glorious imperial past.Footnote 30 In the West, race was used to unify the working classes with the bourgeois elite while in colonial Asia it was seized upon as a liberation ideology to unify and free each of the various countries from imperialism through regeneration and renewal of the race.Footnote 31 Direct experience of colonialism had left many intellectuals in Asia receptive to the Social Darwinist account of the ‘survival of the fittest’ which could explain recent history as well as chart a way forward, out from under the jackboot of Western imperialism.
In Laos, the term xaat in the nineteenth century had meant simply ‘birth’ and had religious connotations in the samsara cycle of death and rebirth; however, the related term chaat began to be used differently in the sense of national identity at the mid-century in Thailand — not to the exclusion of the earlier meaning.Footnote 32Xaat in this sense first appeared in Lao palm leaf manuscripts as early as 1890, predating French colonisation by a few years.Footnote 33 The Lao may well have been influenced by the new usage of the term as it emerged in Thailand. However, there were key differences and unique circumstances surrounding the first Lao usage of the term.Footnote 34 By the 1950s the meaning of the Lao term had clearly become very similar to its Western counterpart. In a 1957 French–Lao dictionary written by one of the foremost of the Lao elite at the time, Somchin P. Nginn, xaat was unambiguously equated with the French race.Footnote 35 Another Francophile Lao of the time, who was also prime minister in the RLG, Katay D. Sasorith, had few misgivings about using the term in his discussion of Laos, employing it freely in his 1953 work.Footnote 36 This may be partly ascribed to the prolonged effects of a racial order instituted by French colonial rule, and as indirectly continued into the RLG period by American patrons. Yet the emergence of a racial ideology in Laos arose from complicated interactions involving many individuals, and a unique feature of the period was that foreign knowledge, ideologies and customs were appropriated, disassembled, recreated and domesticated by local geniuses.Footnote 37 Vital to this process was the ability of new racial ideas to be smoothly appropriated by overlaying on top of existing Lao beliefs. These processes are truly fascinating considering that the very boundary between foreign and Lao was constantly being redrawn and renegotiated. It is a mistake to consider this as simple Westernisation, which would miss crucial aspects such as the Lao elite's selective appropriation of race because it was useful to their ends. While the equivalent term had Western origins, its use and deployment, the context, the terms and conditions, and even the ultimate meaning and significance were all Lao.
The racial aspects of French colonial rule have been widely observed.Footnote 38 It is evident across a broad range of colonial life, from the laws and attitudes shielding the French population to the staffing of the administration and down to the tax regime and census. Pholsena's analysis of the census is illuminating.Footnote 39 The census can be read as a taxonomy of the essence of the Lao as well as other peoples of the country who were defined and racialised. Yet it is also important to observe that French racialist ideas had significant convergences with existing Lao notions. Prior to 1893, both Lao and French held similar basic notions regarding the stratification of humanity.Footnote 40 Neither were the French the only ones interested in physiognomy. The Lao had their own beliefs about skin colour, as can be seen from the gourd story. When considering how the French went about identifying all the various groups in Laos we may note that while they had their own notions, they also used local informants, primarily Lao. Thus we see the French employ Lao terms for minority groups — meo/ແມ້ວ, kha/ຂ້າ, yao/ຢ້າວ, even when such terms were seen as highly offensive to the people in question.Footnote 41 Underlying the French borrowing, the Lao and French saw these ‘primitive’ groups in remarkably similar ways.Footnote 42 More than has been previously recognised, the Lao wrote their own notions into the French census tables.Footnote 43 As for the motivation of the Lao, there is another aspect to the census, recognised by Pholsena, which is that races are listed in order of their perceived superiority, with the Lao placed at the top.Footnote 44 Race, like other notions of cultural superiority, established the natural order: French rule over the colony, and Lao elite rule of the muang and tassaeng with renewed authority over minorities in the country.Footnote 45 While the Lao were left subordinate to the white European races in this new order, as we will see below they would not quietly submit to this positioning in their writings.
A precursor in colonial Laos
The earliest example of the rewriting of the nithan khun bulom was the 1927 publication of a collection of Lao chronicles, written in King Sisavang Vong's (r. 1904–59) hand. It was published under French auspices in Hanoi by the Imprimerie d'Extrême-Orient.Footnote 46 While the text amounts to little more than a collection of various copies of chronicles, the title Phongsavadan xaat lao already indicates a new moment in the discourse on Lao identity. This document is an early precursor of the modern histories to come for more reasons than simply employing the term xaat in its distinctly new sense of national identity. It is the first Lao-authored text to include all the chronicles from the heretofore separate kingdoms of Laos — Luang Prabang, Vientiane, Champasak, Xieng Khuang — as a single national history. Furthermore, this is the first text to remove or suppress mythical aspects of the chronicles it treats to present a more scientific, modern and literal account. Finally, it was the first of the modern accounts to sanitise earlier accounts of the gourd story from the 1890s to the 1910s which included racist attacks on ethnic minorities in Laos (kha, yao). Ultimately, however, the later modernist historians would further alter the nithan khun bulom beyond recognition compared to any version from the nineteenth century. The 1927 text, therefore, marks a truly transitionary moment in the development of these processes.
Much of the alterations can be seen already in the new layout and reorganisation of the chronicle. There has clearly been an effort to rationalise the content and organise it logically, including the addition of chapters and section headings that one would never see in a palm leaf manuscript.Footnote 47 Moreover, the divisions introduced into the earliest portions of the text are illuminating. The first part titled Phongsavadan pathet lao is the familiar story of how the area for Luang Prabang was selected for the founding of the city, due to its auspicious and sacred qualities, and the subsequent boundaries set by the ancient wise men (chao ratsi). It also includes tales of the Nantha dynasty and Chantaphanit, the latter having discovered the gold and silver trees in the city, representing the prosperity of the area. The second part is titled Phongsavadan xaat lao, which consists of the remainder of the chronicle, but especially the story of Khun Bulom and the gourd story, which is indicated by the following transition inserted by the author of the 1927 version:
The original royal lineage of the city expired when lord Chanthaphanit entered heaven. [From then on] it is we the people of the Lao xaat who rule the country in succession until the present day.Footnote 48
It is significant that the first section is perceived not to include any ethnic Lao persons and so the chronicle is only called the Phongsavadan pathet lao (Chronicle of the Lao country), but the opening of the Khun Bulom story is apprehended to tell the origin of the Lao so that the chronicle then is properly titled the Phongsavadan xaat lao (Chronicle of the Lao race). This is a first inchoate move toward the discovery by modern Lao historians of the ‘birth of the Lao race’. In dividing the sections this way one notes there is an abiding concern that the people in the first section are not Lao.Footnote 49 The modern period is marked by many similar instances in which the chronicle distinguishes between those who are Lao and those who are not, although now marking this boundary by insertion of the phrase ‘xaat Lao’.
As for what has been removed from the nineteenth-century accounts in this version, the bulk of the mythic content that is missing is from the opening of the text. One significant change is that there is no description of the creation of the world — the Maha Kap story — as in many other older versions of the nithan khun bulom. This version merely concerns itself with Luang Prabang's founding. It is restricted to that one particular corner of the world, rather than taking its subject as the world. Overall the section is more truncated than nineteenth-century versions. It makes up a much smaller proportion of the text, which is now dominated by the ‘literal’, ‘historical’ reign of Lao kings from Fa Ngum onward. These changes appear in the version written in the hand of Sisavang Vong, who otherwise made himself appear to be quite modern. One cannot forget the accounts of this king in his European suit, smoking a cigarette, driving his Ford automobile around Luang Prabang.Footnote 50 He was the first king to be educated in the French system, going abroad to France from a young age, and the first of the Francophile generation whose upbringing would have impressed in him an awareness of the Western sciences, and shown him presentations of French history denuded of its legends, to an extent, replaced with the fervent nationalism of the age.
Finally we will consider the gourd story in which the racist abuse from an earlier period is sanitised. The difference here is that unlike in earlier versions from the 1890s to 1910s there is no mention of either the Lao or the Kha, but only a generic referent ‘people’ (ຄົນ). As a result, in the 1927 version little emphasis is placed on the differences between the two groups who emerge from the gourd; instead this account treats both equally. But as much as this new version elides the differences, it still is unable to totally erase the innate qualities of the story; thus this sanitised version still makes references to the skin colour of the first group. The essential meaning of the gourd story is the simple truth that groups of people are not the same, yet in the 1890s it was rewritten to emphasise the natural superiority of one group versus another. The alterations which Sisavang Vong introduced, however, laid emphasis on shared qualities and what was held in common among the different peoples. The following is the sanitised account in the 1927 text:
Grandpa really took out a red iron tool and bored a hole with it. All the people spilled out. Khun Khan saw that, then he really took a large chisel and went to chisel out one side of the gourd. People spilled out for three days and three nights, then really [it was] finished. Those who came out the bore hole were two groups: one was called tai lom, one was called tai lue. Those who came out of the chisel hole were three groups: one was tai lo, one was tai lung, one was tai kwang. The people who came out of the gourd did not know their origin, their own upbringing and they did not know respect. Grandpa rang seung really taught them the knowledge to subsist and told them to pair up and become husband and wife and to make houses and to give respect to their parents or anyone who was older than them and told them to make a funeral for those who died: the group who came out of the chiselled hole should be cremated and the group that came out of the bore should be buried. Footnote 51
Only the italicised portion preserves the pattern from the late nineteenth-century versions. It is the only part that indicates how the two groups, the Lao and the Kha, were different to the core of their natures. In this version, however, the term people (ຄົນ) replaces the terms lao (ລາວ) and kha (ຂ້າ) such that it serves to sanitise this version. One can only speculate on the motivations behind this act (which was itself convenient myth-making). Perhaps to counter earlier versions, Sisavang Vong appears to have made an effort to moderate popular sentiments. But, we really know very little about the context in which this text was produced. Yet, in broad terms, we see many of the basic themes which make up the 1950s texts are already present in this 1927 text, albeit in a transitional form.
Before considering the RLG period, we should appreciate the long delay in the advent of Lao language printing during the French colonial period.Footnote 52 As a young man, Sisavang Vong saw a printing press at a colonial exhibit in Hanoi and his father Sakkalin (r.1895–1904) expressed interest in acquiring one for Luang Prabang, but this never materialised. Mayoury and Pheuiphan Ngaosrivathana further note that it was Sisavang Vong who created the first punches for the national printing office only decades later in 1931 for the colonial exhibition in Paris.Footnote 53 Still, this was hardly a turning point as few publications appeared afterward in Laos. There were so few print media in the 1930s that Lao would transcribe Thai printed books onto palm leaf manuscripts.Footnote 54 The only major effort involving print was the Lao Nyai newspaper, but this was tightly controlled by the French, spreading their ‘colonial legitimizing discourse’ in the local language.Footnote 55 In Vietnam the French successfully replaced the Nôm script with the Roman script, but similar efforts in Cambodia and Laos only began later and were ultimately abandoned. One French official in 1918 suggested using the Thai script rather than trying to develop a Lao script.Footnote 56 The Lao themselves also played a role in the delay as there was a long-simmering dispute as to what the modern Lao script should be.Footnote 57 At any rate in late colonial Laos, some among the Lao elite preferred using French anyway.Footnote 58 The foregoing perhaps explains why it was only in the RLG period that Social Darwinist accounts appeared, when they were already being rejected elsewhere in the wake of the horrors witnessed worldwide during the Second World War.
Rewriting the nithan khun bulom in France
One of the first publications of the new generation of modern Lao historians was written by Katay Don Sasorith, who rewrote the nithan khun bulom for a French audience in 1953. However, his approach was quite different from his peers writing within the country. Rather than participate in the discovery of the ‘birth of the Lao race’ by writing a hagiographic account of the great achievements of the Lao race since ancient times, Katay wrote as a critic. He looked back on his culture as an unsentimental, at times ruthless modernist. He could hardly mention the story of Khun Bulom without at the same time labelling it a ‘legend’ or ‘tradition’. In rewriting the traditional aspects of this story, he said he was ‘stripping … all of which can fit into a novel, poetry or simple literature’.Footnote 59 Yet from his unique perspective, he went further than his peers by questioning some core beliefs which they dared not displace in their own endeavours. In certain places, Katay even challenged the Lao elite's cherished racial project. No such prominent voices would appear in the country until after the fall of the RLG in 1975.
Katay did share with other Lao writers a similar view on race in broad terms. For instance, he opened his book describing a greater Lao race scattered across northeast Thailand, Cambodia and northwestern Vietnam, whom he said still spoke, and called themselves, Lao.Footnote 60 This opening is similar to that of the author of Chao Phetsarat, Ironman of Laos, which reveals the significance writers of the time placed on the notion of a ‘greater race’.Footnote 61 In other places Katay elaborates on the history of the race by referring to Chinese records showing it to be over 4,000 years old.Footnote 62 He further plots the tragic history of the ‘greater race’, which engaged in fratricidal infighting only to be dominated by outsiders.Footnote 63 In doing so, he praises the example of the United States, whose people have diverse origins, but ‘all have or quickly acquire the American nationality’.Footnote 64 On the other hand, he questions the racial makeup of the Thai state by suggesting that a majority of the population are Lao.Footnote 65 Taken together, his views appear to be a mix of French racial critiques of Siam and Thai racial theories. But he was not blindly optimistic regarding race either. He alluded to the ‘racial particularism’ displayed in his country's name by praising the former ‘neutral term’, ‘Lan Xang Kingdom’, and further described at length the destructive impacts that the racist renaming of the state had in Thailand for the Lao minority there.Footnote 66
When it came to his own rewriting of the nithan khun bulom, Katay made similar moves by turning to histories of southern China for a suitable substitute. Thus he wrote that Khun Bulom was ‘none other than a descendant of the Tai kings who reigned formerly in China’.Footnote 67 Once Lao writers like him had discarded their legends, they began to raise interesting questions about their people's origins. Katay, like Sila and others of his generation, presented Chinese history as the key to unlocking the lost history of the Lao, where they had migrated from, and so on. In places he makes efforts to reconcile what is known from Western and Chinese histories with what appears in Lao chronicles.Footnote 68 Nonetheless he feels compelled to include a brief account of Khun Bulom, now rewritten in ironic fashion, in his otherwise contemporary account of Lao politics. As much as he radically critiqued it, he was unable to escape his generation's fascination with Khun Bulom, and thus he rewrote it for a modern, albeit foreign and largely disinterested, audience.
Katay broke from others of his time and challenged the RLG elite's new myth-making in certain passages of the work. Perhaps his most radical departure is discarding the claim which other Lao modernists clung to fiercely: that Khun Bulom was the original ancestor of the Lao race. The other Lao modernists had performed a number of operations, removing the legendary aspects, just as Katay had, but they did not wish to destroy Khun Bulom's role as the father of the Lao. Rather they sought exclusively to modernise it by tailoring it to fit the contemporary scientific disciplines of race and history. They altered the story of Khun Bulom in order to save it, preserving it by recreating it in an acceptable form for the next generation. Katay, however, quickly shattered this nascent movement at the end of his own version by noting that Khun Bulom was not the father of the Lao race, but strictly speaking could only be considered the progenitor of the ruling line:
Anyway, Khun Bulom is not strictly speaking the common ancestor of all the populations of the Lao race or the original Lao who inhabited the Indochina peninsula, as is quite commonly believed, but of all the original Lao or Tai rulers who governed the populations. It is the extension of the word ‘father’ (the king, the prince is considered, here as elsewhere, as being the father of his subjects, the father of the people) which gave rise to this ambiguity in the mind of the masses.Footnote 69
Katay's conception of Khun Bulom is actually much closer to the nineteenth-century understanding, in which the nithan khun bulom is a recitation of the genealogy of kings. In dealing with the story, he does not fall into the trap of nationalist history rewriting like his peers. He is thus able to maintain the earlier meaning of the story; he does not alter it for the sake of nationalism. Yet the most significant point of his comment is that he analyses what his fellow nationalists are doing to distort the meaning of the story, which he identifies as the false claim that Khun Bulom was the common ancestor. His critique of their misuse and unwarranted extension of the word ‘father’ implies that his fellow nationalists are taking the word at face value, rather than seeing it in its correct metaphorical sense. In this way he unmasks his fellow nationalists as not being truthful to history, but in fact making a new myth of Khun Bulom for the twentieth century, as the racial father of the Lao.Footnote 70
The ‘birth of the Lao race’ in the RLG
The discovery by modern Lao historians of the ‘birth of the Lao race’ was arguably the most significant and lasting creative act in RLG culture and society. For all its shortcomings, the Lao elite who fashioned this new ideology were attempting to revive the greatness of their people and to reassert themselves on the global stage at a crucial moment in history. The RLG elite were competing with the Pathet Lao for the loyalty of the nation. The racial-nationalist ideology they fashioned not only challenged the Western imperialist order that subjugated them as inferiors to be ‘civilised’, but also strove to defeat the Marxist ideology of the Pathet Lao by appealing to nationalist sentiment: to the greatness of the Lao race, to its age and civilisation, and to all the beautiful things that one could celebrate about Lao culture — art, music, poetry, literature, etc., that the Soviets would condemn as degenerate, and about Lao identity, as opposed to internationalism.Footnote 71 One may appreciate these works as an expression and articulation of nationalism as envisioned by the elite and produced for mass consumption in the RLG period. One may further consider them as a clue to the failure of the RLG. Pholsena has observed of the gourd story that it told of the natural right of the Lao to rule the non-Lao.Footnote 72 While the modernists discarded the gourd story as ‘legend’, they replaced it in their rewriting with the science of races, applying it to each race and grading the different civilisation levels. In the new ‘birth of the Lao race’ narrative, the Lao self-justification to rule over the minorities was renewed, but now rather than it being their divine right, instead scientists discovered in history the innate superiority of the Lao as evinced in its culture, its writing, art, cities, and observance of a major world religion, all of which placed the Lao above the ‘primitives’ living in remote forests and mountains who, lacking any such refinements, were deemed inferior. For all its noble intent to celebrate the country the new ideology of the RLG was exclusionary and not accepting of diversity, which aided the RLG's enemies.
The themes considered in each writer's work include the following points. Each historian focuses on the creation of the xaat, which appears most strongly in the early period of history. There was a scientific veneer to this narrative. The xaat was always noted for its great antiquity and its high development, since ‘birth’. Yet the xaat was threatened by enemies — often Chinese or, at times, nomadic barbarians. Ultimately the early history was emplotted in the ‘survival of the fittest’ narrative, in which the strongest race prevailed and subsequently secured the resources necessary to its progress. The story is told as a comedy, in which the Lao race is placed in constant danger, threatened by destruction, but always manages to survive.Footnote 73 However, it is also a warning for the future, imploring the next generation to continue advancing or face oblivion.
The focus on Lao writers here should not give the impression that they worked in isolation. Many Western and Thai scholars joined the Lao in rewriting the nithan khun bulom.Footnote 74 Unfortunately, many Lao writers of the time did not always clarify who they were engaging with in their academic discussions. Khamchan, for instance, gave no indication of whom he read. On the other hand both Sila and Chao Khamman Vongkotrattana included bibliographies to their later works which provide crucial insights into their thinking. Thai writers were one source of inspiration: Sila consulted several works by Luang Wichit Watakan, the Phrachum phongsawadan series and two other histories of the Thai xaat. He also cited approvingly William Clifton Dodd's 1923 The Thai race: Elder brother of the Chinese, accepting Dodd's etymology of the word ‘Lao’ as meaning originally ‘great’. Sila further expanded on Dodd by noting this meant ‘the Lao xaat is a great xaat (ຊາດໃຫຍ່) having many people and development, or a xaat with a high level of civilisation since ancient times’.Footnote 75 Unlike Sila, Khamman placed an emphasis on Lao sources, although he still relied on Thai works. Furthermore, Khamman cited French works such as the Mission Pavie. When it came to French authors, Sila made no explicit reference to any of their works, yet the impact of their scholarship in his writing is plainly evident. Khamchan made clear his indebtedness to French writers, such as referring to ancient China as the ‘Empire Celeste’.Footnote 76 In a profound way, all were in fact responding to earlier French presentations of the Lao race. As they engaged with Thai and Western writings they also popularised such notions in the country for those who would not otherwise have access to them.
Rewriting the nithan khun bulom
To modernise the story of Khun Bulom, Khamchan, like others, reimagines the king as the ruler of the historical Nanzhao kingdom.Footnote 77 Furthermore, he specifically identifies Khun Bulom as Lao. He continues by noting that Khun Bulom's eldest son was Khun Lo and from his ‘great royal lineage the Lao are descended from down to today’.Footnote 78 By this crucial literary stroke, Khamchan synecdochally transforms Khun Bulom into the father of the Lao xaat. In the modern era of popular sovereignty and democracy, elite intellectuals in the racial-nationalist movement refigured Khun Bulom to match their conceptions, thus he was presented as the father of the xaat. As for the gourd story, Khamchan notes the existence of a ‘legend’ (ນີທານ) in which the Lao were said to be born from a gourd in Muang Thaen.Footnote 79 However, he dismisses this by saying that the ‘truth’ is that the Muang Thaen of the gourd story is really only a metaphor for China.
In his rewriting, Sila makes frequent reference to Chinese chronicles and the Phongsawadan xaat thai, showing his indebtedness to these sources. Yet his account was actually quite independent from either of them. Sila makes only one brief mention of the gourd story and does not explicitly label it a legend, only denying it implicitly.Footnote 80 He likewise makes no mention of the mythic nineteenth-century treatments of Khun Bulom. Yet Sila did fundamentally remake Khun Bulom by turning the heavenly primus inter pares into a mere mortal human, but a hero nonetheless. This new conception would have been incomprehensible in the previous century. In place of the godly being, Sila recreates Khun Bulom as an ideal warrior-king. Khun Bulom is now but one king in the line-of-succession of the ‘Lao country’ of Nanzhao, fighting to secure independence for his people from the Chinese:
The line of Lao kings did rule the country in Nakhon Nongsae continuing from King Lo Saeng down three more kings, then really came Khunbulom Rasathirat, who in the Chinese chronicles was called Pi Lo Ko. Khun Bulom Rasathirat or Phrachao Pi Lo Ko was the Lao king who was brave, a skilled expert in war and who did expand the realm of the Lao of Nongsae to be vast and wide to its utmost.Footnote 81
Sila lauds Khun Bulom's bravery and martial abilities which propelled his conquest of a sizeable earthly domain. Khun Bulom's coming to Muang Thaen is that of a great conqueror from China coming to found a new city; Thaen is seen as a haven from Chinese attacks.Footnote 82 Finally, in this version, Khun Bulom ages and dies; however great he is, he is mortal.Footnote 83 Yet his humanness makes him identifiable to his readers, not as a god to invoke, but as a historical personage to emulate. The greatness and spirit of the mortal Khun Bulom only lives on in the Lao xaat, the patrimony of all Lao. Sila creates a person who is very much a founder on par with Ramkhamhaeng, but appearing several centuries earlier. For Sila, Khun Bulom is the crucial link between written Lao history, the forgotten history of the Lao of Nanzhao and the birth of the Lao xaat.
Birth of the Lao race
While many wrote of it, Sila was the only one to actually include this exact phrase in his work. The influence of his 1957 history should not be underestimated. It was written to commemorate the 2500th year of the Buddhist era, and enjoyed huge influence in Laos, but it was also one of the few works to gain an international audience, being translated into English and Thai. History at its most basic level is a search for origins, and Sila's ‘birth of the Lao race’ was his attempt to answer that question for the Lao. No longer explained with recourse to myth, Sila's approach to Lao origins called on his understanding of the social sciences, especially anthropology. In fact he opens with a ‘scientific’ discourse on the origin of humans. From there he moves to describe the branches of humanity in Asia:
Of humans that were born from the centre of sumphutip there were many groups, but the biggest groups that established themselves, living in settlements in Asia, were four groups:
1. The Chinese, subsisting by animal husbandry along the banks of the Caspian Sea in the southeast.
2. The Tartar who depend on the wilderness subsisting by pillaging, using horses.
3. The Sanongnyu who reside in the land of Korea up to Mongolia, subsisting by pillaging the same.
4. The Ai Lao, establishing foundations in the land between Hwangho River and Yangzi which is now the kingdom of the Chinese. The Ai Lao live by agriculture.Footnote 84
His approach is that of an ‘anthropologist’, distinguishing between diverse peoples. His inventory of Asian peoples shows two basic types of early man: first, the developed agriculturalist who is established and by implication ‘civilised’; and second, the other, more ‘primitive’ man who is nomadic, lives in the wilderness, and pillages to satisfy his needs. By carefully framing the discussion, Sila sets up a dichotomy of ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ races. Following certain criteria, it is shown that the Lao number among the ‘civilised’ races, along with the Chinese. Further, the ‘civilised’ races are described in relatively peaceful terms, whereas the ‘primitives’ are portrayed as violent brigands. The origins of the Lao, which Sila has discovered, are that of an already-advanced people, but also one of the oldest races in the world:
Anyhow, the people of the Lao race were born already in the world together with the Chinese race, counting as one of the oldest races in the world, who had vast refinements, not lower than any other race in the same period.Footnote 85
Sila's claim to the extreme age of the Lao was echoed by others including Khamman, Khamchan and Katay. The significance of this is only clarified by the last phrase of the above passage. From Sila's investigations into the literal history of the Lao, he has gained new awareness of the antiquity and high civilisational attainments of the Lao, who deserve special recognition. Like most cases, it is important to understand who Sila was comparing the Lao to here. While in other passages he makes comparisons with minorities, here it is the world at large that is his concern. By claiming such, Sila, and others, were presenting evidence of their superior status, especially in regards to their former colonial masters in the West. Indeed, it was only when the Lao modernists took up the sciences of race and history that they were able to discover that they were not really inferior to anyone else in the world. In this way, the Lao modernists rejected the racial superiority of the white European races by arguing that the Lao had greater claims to civilisational attainments at a much earlier date.
Chao Khamman Vongkotrattana's history of the Lao xaat appeared in 1961. He was a family member of the Front Palace in Luang Prabang, but he was also an extraordinarily learned scholar, being perhaps the most prolific and knowledgeable Lao historian of his time. He shared with others a fascination for the origins of the Lao, the location of which he admitted was not known for certain. In his version, the Lao enter history migrating from the Altai mountains roughly 5,000 years ago. They were already skilled farmers, which led them to evaluate the Yangzi River basin, determining it as ‘appropriate for planting’.Footnote 86 This early success led them to actively expand from there. Striking a similar note to Sila, he notes superior Lao achievements.
When the xonxaat Tai came down to establish settlements in the geography already mentioned above, the settlements of the Tai were ‘healthy and wealthy’ and progressed more than the branch of the Mongolian xaat. This was because the Tai had systematic administration for 4,000 years already while in that age the people of Europe were still sitting covered in animal skins (ຊາວເອີໂຣປຍັງນຸ່ງຫົ່ມໜັງສັຕວ໌).Footnote 87
The Lao were already a mighty civilisation before the Europeans had even ceased roaming as nomads and learned to sow the fields, much less hold a stylus.
Khamman was preoccupied with portraying the Lao as a special race born already aged and wise. To support this, Khamman theorised that a system of government originated from agriculture and surmised that anything less resulted in anarchy. This is most evident from his study of the Lao and Chinese. The Chinese appeared as nomads migrating south who encountered an already advanced Lao civilisation. Khamman boasted ‘the Tai were there before the Chinese for 1,000 years’.Footnote 88 Even when the Chinese took land by force they remained in a state of anarchy as ‘they had no administration’.Footnote 89 When the Chinese finally did learn how to farm rice, they ‘took the Tai example’.Footnote 90 The majority of Khamman's chapter is in fact devoted to the growth of the Chinese state. He was unable to tell in great detail a similar story of the Lao, due to a lack of sources. This puts his narration under strain, but he makes it fit by casting the Chinese as the enemy of the Lao. He even claims certain Chinese cultural achievements as Lao, such as the building of the Great Wall.Footnote 91 Yet the struggle between Lao and Chinese was a slow decline of the greater Tai race at the hands of the Chinese. Century after century, the Lao fought the Chinese in a desperate struggle to maintain their freedom against greater numbers. They never submitted to the Chinese, preferring to sacrifice land instead. The ancient Lao had an ‘enduring love of freedom’, which meant in the text that they wanted a ruler of their own race and a racially homogenous state. Without this love of freedom, the early Lao would have acquiesced to being absorbed by the burgeoning Chinese state, their racial identity annihilated.Footnote 92 Yet the Lao refused to submit and each time they lost a war, more fled south. Only in the reign of the ‘heroic’ Khun Bulom did the Lao reconstitute the greater race in a kingdom called ‘Muang Tai’ stretching from Tonkin to Tibet, further extended to the south by his seven sons.Footnote 93
Survival of the fittest
Sila's study of the Golden Peninsula reveals to him a history of various peoples struggling to survive, in which the stronger races overpowered and absorbed the weaker ones. His views are well illustrated by passages on the Khom and Lwa, but perhaps most clearly for the Lwa. Falling before stronger neighbours, the Lwa's defeat by the Khom's superior ability to ‘develop’ led to the worst fate. Their racial identity was eradicated, their culture and heritage were lost, and any survivor was enslaved to be a low-caste servant of the victors. Sila's claim that the Khom were an old Lao group made the comparison for the Lao plain. It was a compelling historical lesson for the Lao, facing their neighbours, unveiling the brutal nature of the world, otherwise normally hidden by a veneer of civility:
The Lwa are a xaat which did not develop equally with the Khom. Therefore when the Khom expanded their power into the north, the Khom really seized the land of the Lwa, all of it gone. The Lwa really disappeared — ພວກລົວະຈິ່ງເສື່ອມສູນລົງ —. [They] became citizens of the Khom like the original Khom — the Kha — became the citizens of the Lao in the present dayFootnote 94
In order to survive the xaat had to keep progressing and not fall behind, or it would be overwhelmed. The ultimate punishment was to suffer the destruction of one's xaat, and hence lose one's identity. Such an idea was not totally unprecedented in earlier Lao intellectual discourse. In many nineteenth century Lao palm leaf manuscripts ‘to disappear/ເສົ້າສູນເສັຍ’ was a curse that was frequently invoked as a terrible fate for those who failed to heed the warnings.Footnote 95 In accordance with his modernist project, Sila adjusted the earlier Lao notion to fit modern scientific discourse, which he used in his historical interpretations. By the same token, the Lao elite's appropriation of this trope of racism was easier, more palatable and more compelling in as much as there was an existing analog in the learned discourse of the Lao.
Khamchan's account of the early period bears striking similarities to Sila's work. While the Lao xaat reprises its role as the protagonist, Khamchan presents it in unique terms. For not long after the migration of the Lao xaat into the Yellow River basin, they are ‘invaded’ by the Chinese. In the final confrontation, we can see Khamchan returning to Social Darwinism in his interpretation of this struggle:
After the diplomatic visit was over, the Chinese had the success to spread their political influence out frequently until they did seize the Lao lands bit by bit; the beautiful country was filled with Chinese. The Lao retreated into the forest, the mountains and the outer marginal regions like the present day.Footnote 96
The weaker race was forced to leave the rich Yangzi basin and subsist on poorer ‘marginal’ land; its subsequent development would be impaired by a lack of resources.Footnote 97 However, instead of Social Darwinism merely serving as a warning by allusion, Khamchan identifies it as a direct process in the history of the Lao themselves. Were it not for the warlike advances the Chinese made on Lao land, or the tragic defeat which forced the Lao to seek refuge in the south, one can only imagine the new heights Lao civilisation might have reached. Khamchan writes of the continual hardships facing Lao history using repetitive language: ‘release the [Chinese/Thai] yoke from the Lao neck’.Footnote 98 To Khamchan, Lao history has been shaped by its struggles with others, the Lao people bearing all the resulting scars. Unlike Sila, who presented the Lao as the end-point of the Lwa and the Khom who were surpassed, Khamchan instead presents the Lao on the losing side of history, which may very well represent the contrasting vigour of the early years of the RLG period as opposed to the twilight of its latter days in the midst of the Vietnam War.
Conclusion
On a Monday afternoon, 27 September 1971, many Lao intellectuals who were gathered for a history seminar in Vientiane returned from the last coffee break for the next presenter. They were in the audience for a speech on the ‘birth of the Lao race’ made by Sila.Footnote 99 Sila's address was composed very much like a postscript. Much of what he had to say was gleaned from his 1957 work with only minor adjustments. His peers were already familiar with his major points, which was suggested by the meandering approach he took as much as by the influence he had on their works. By this point, the ‘birth of the Lao race’ thesis was widely accepted, and its repetition in the history seminar could be said to be the culminating moment in its achievement of hegemony within the RLG. Sila merely added now that the gourd story was legend, and the mythic treatments of Khun Bulom from the nineteenth century really referred to Nanzhao in China.Footnote 100 Only two years later, Sila's latest work would be included in the national curriculum for secondary schools. The ‘birth of the Lao race’ had become dogma in RLG schools.Footnote 101
Yet the work of the modernist Lao historians in the RLG period was only part of a broader transformation in the country, which can be traced as far back as the 1890s. The conclusion of the Ho wars (1869–89) and the unprecedented migration of new ethnic minorities to the country from China had major impacts on Lao society which few have recognised, overshadowed by French conquest a few years later. The issues we have considered in the RLG period were therefore only the latter stages in the broader sequence of events. In the RLG period, Laos became a nation, a state founded on the basis of popular sovereignty and a constitutional monarch, in line with the rest of the world. Yet the colonial period for various reasons left that transition tinged with racialist thought, plainly evident in RLG works.
To conclude, we return to our opening question: Lao historians’ inability to reject the Nanzhao thesis, which Grant Evans sought to finally dispel. A stubborn hold-out from the RLG era, the idea's continued currency may be due to enduring concerns among Lao intellectuals to assert a Lao place in the world and promote the value of Lao civilisation in the human past. Whether current Lao intellectuals address notions of Lao superiority tied to the Nanzhao thesis is beyond the scope of this article. This article has offered an analysis of RLG writing to show the ways in which the rewriting of the nithan khun bulom shaped twentieth-century Lao culture, which produced a modernist and autonomous Lao nationalism during the RLG period. Yet this intellectual endeavour faced a serious dilemma it never resolved: the project to create a celebratory nationalist history never escaped ethnocentrism. Nevertheless, the historical works of the RLG elite provide unique insight into Lao nationalist sentiment. Theirs was a form of elite-nationalism that envisioned the xaat through recourse to history. This study has demonstrated the process by which the modernist Lao elite rewrote the nithan khun bulom, while preserving the text's worldview of the Lao as civilised and the minorities as primitive, by recourse to racial science. As part of this process, the Lao elite clashed with the Pathet Lao and the West in their writings. Yet the rewriting of the nithan khun bulom was imprinted with the Social Darwinist ‘survival of the fittest’ narrative, which created an exclusionary nationalism that ultimately weakened the RLG in its ideological struggles. The rewriting of the nithan khun bulom was one facet of a wider effort by the Lao elite to appropriate race, which they enlisted in service to their claim to civility in new and distinctly modern ways. Yet the most significant aspect of the RLG elite's work may well be its links to the past, found in otherwise deliberately modern writings.
