Halfway down the Danube

The National Museum

Visited the National Museum of Laos the other day.

If you find this sort of thing interesting, notes below the fold.

-- Laos has dinosaurs. Who knew? A French scientist named Josué Heilman Hoffet discovered rich fossil beds in the south in 1936. He was supposed to be looking for oil, but there was no oil. There were these cool rocks, though, and also fascinating plants and animals, tribes who had never seen a white man... it sounds like he had quite a time. An old-fashioned natural scientist in the broad sense, turned loose in one of the last places where a talented generalist could have all sorts of fun.

Alas, the Japanese occupation of Indochina cut his studies short a few years later. Hoffet joined the French Resistance in 1944 and died fighting the Japanese in 1945. That was the end of paleontology in Laos for fifty-some years. Digging didn't start again until 1993.

Anyway, dinosaurs.

-- The Plain of Jars. Holy socks. I vaguely knew about this, but I had no idea how weird it was.

See, in eastern Laos, a few hours drive from the capital, there are these stone... jars. Urns, if you like. They're huge, five or six feet tall and three or four feet across. There are hundreds of them, gathered into 50 or so sites. And they're made of solid stone. Most weigh two or three tons, and the bigger ones go over 10 tons.

Archeology can date the jars (they're around 2000 years old) but nobody has the faintest idea who built them, or why. "An unknown culture, that seemed to have access to metal tools, and that really liked big jars," is the best answer so far. It's a Stonehenge, Easter Island kind of thing, except that we know a lot more about those things than we do about the Plain of Jars.

The Museum had a single jar. It was quite something -- solid black stone, crudely worked, big enough to climb into.

If I ever get back to Laos... well. Maybe in a decade or so, when the boys are all at summer camp.

-- Fa Ngum. That was funny. See, we lived in Serbia for two years. And if you know anything about Serbs, you know that they're fascinated by their medieval history... a period of a century or so when Serbia was briefly the dominant power in the region, controlling an empire that stretched from the Adriatic to the Aegean.

Well, Laos also had a medieval empire. King Fa Ngum carved out a kingdom that included most of modern Laos plus a huge chunk of Thailand.

So... he has a huge exhibit at the Museum. Pictures, statue, maps showing his empire, a painting of him crushing the Thais. (I think I already mentioned that the Lao are funny about the Thais.) Clearly the Communists had accepted him as a national hero, feudalism notwithstanding. Was there ever a Communist country where ideology didn't eventually get hijacked by nationalism?

Anyway, the Fa Ngum room was uncannily familiar. It was like being back in Belgrade and looking at the Stefan Dushan exhibit. Convergent evolution in small-country nationalism.

Oh, and: if you ever visit Vientiane, Fa Ngum is the big golden statue on the way in from the airport.

-- Communism. That was interesting too, in a different way. Once you reach the French colonial period, the Museum settles into good old fashioned, no-kidding Communist propaganda. The French are brutal, greedy imperialists; the Laotian royalty and nobility were corrupt and selfish. It's all road gangs and shackles until, thank goodness, the Communist Party of Indochina shows up.

Bronze busts of Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, and Kaysone Phomvihan (the revolutionary leader and first Communist Prime Minister). Paintings, in primitive-socialist-realist style, of valiant revolutionaries defeating the imperialists. Captured American weapons (come to think of it, Serbia has those too). Black-and-white photographs or revolutionary heroes and martyrs. It's old school.

(In more ways than one. Some of the exhibits don't seem to have been updated since about 1987. The photographs of a very young-looking Gorbachev, for instance... apparently he was the only Soviet leader to visit Indochina.)

Anyway. If you're ever in Vientiane, check it out. It only costs a dollar, and the building alone (an old French government building, surrounded by plumeria trees) is worth that. Recommended.

Posted by douglas at February 11, 2006 02:28 PM