Laos: Laos is often called the country that slowed down. Beyond the Mekong, the mountains, the monasteries, and the rice fields lie bombs buried in the soil, families scattered across the world, a newly built railway, and the households living their lives in between. Keys to the culture: ບໍ່ເປັນຫຍັງ · ບາສີ · ບຸນ · ມ່ວນ. Geography and history, the church, films and books, and prayer for this land.
Laos is often called the country that slowed down. Beyond the Mekong, the mountains, the monasteries, and the rice fields lie bombs buried in the soil, families scattered across the world, a newly built railway, and the households living their lives in between.
Laos is the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia. It borders China's Yunnan to the north, Vietnam to the east, and Cambodia to the south; to the west it faces Thailand across the Mekong, and in the northwest it touches Myanmar. Most of the land is mountain and plateau, and the Annamite Range runs along the Vietnamese border in the east. The Mekong flows through Laos from north to south and forms the border for long stretches in the west. Its seven million or so people live mostly on the flat land along the Mekong and its tributaries; mountain villages are scattered, and in many places the rainy season cuts the roads.
This single geographical fact explains much about Laos. On the lowlands the Lao grow wet rice, live in houses on stilts, and go to the monastery; on the slopes and ridges live the Khmu, the Hmong, the Yao, and others. The government recognizes about fifty ethnic groups, with very different languages, beliefs, and livelihoods. Abundant water and steep mountains have led Laos to stake its hopes on hydropower, aiming to become the “battery of Southeast Asia,” which has also brought resettlement, dam safety concerns, and the pressure of foreign debt. The China–Laos Railway, opened in 2021, runs from Mohan in Yunnan across the border crossing to Vientiane, the first railway to cross northern Laos and link it with China. For most Chinese readers, Laos is no longer remote: railways, construction sites, border trade, students, and tour groups move between the two countries. The question is whether, when we go, we see only cheap scenery, or a neighbor whose population is small but who carries wounds and dignity of their own.
The ancestors of today's Lao moved south into the middle Mekong in waves around a thousand years ago. In 1353 Fa Ngum founded the kingdom of Lan Xang at Luang Prabang. “Lan Xang” means “a million elephants,” and Theravada Buddhism became a pillar of royal power and social life. Over the following centuries Lan Xang waxed and waned, maneuvering among Burmese, Siamese, and Vietnamese powers. In the early eighteenth century the kingdom split into Luang Prabang, Vientiane, and Champasak and gradually fell under Siamese control. From 1826 to 1828 Chao Anouvong of Vientiane rose against Siam and was defeated; Vientiane was nearly razed and large numbers of people were forcibly moved to the west bank of the Mekong, which is one reason so many people in Thailand's northeastern Isan region still speak Lao.
In 1893 France forced Siam to cede the lands east of the Mekong, and Laos was absorbed into French Indochina. The French built some roads and set up an administration, but ran Laos as a back yard of Vietnam; many Vietnamese clerks came into the towns, and education remained very limited. Nationalism rose after the Second World War. Laos became fully independent in 1953, but the armed conflict between the royal government and the Vietnamese-backed Pathet Lao did not end with it. The 1954 Geneva conference arranged a ceasefire, and a declaration of neutrality was signed in 1962, but neutrality was never truly realized.
During the Vietnam War, North Vietnam built supply lines through the mountains of eastern Laos, while the United States fought an undeclared “secret war” in Laos: it armed and trained mountain forces drawn mainly from the Hmong, and from 1964 to 1973 it bombed continuously. Per person, Laos is often described as the most heavily bombed country in history. A significant share of the cluster submunitions dropped never exploded, and they still injure people in fields, beside schools, and under village paths; many of the casualties are children.
In 1975 the Pathet Lao took power, abolished the monarchy, and established the Lao People's Democratic Republic under one-party rule by the Lao People's Revolutionary Party. Many former officials were then sent in turn to “seminar” re-education camps, and the last king was taken away in 1977; many never returned. Over the next decade or so, roughly a tenth of the population crossed the Mekong into Thai refugee camps and moved on to the United States, France, Australia, and elsewhere. Hmong who had fought for the American side were hunted down, and some hid in the forests for decades.
From 1986 Laos pursued “new thinking,” opening markets and inviting foreign investment, and it joined ASEAN in 1997. Hydropower dams, mines, rubber plantations, and the China–Laos Railway followed one after another, and the cities changed quickly, but foreign debt, inflation, and currency depreciation have made life tighter for many families. Laos today must carry three things forward at once: the bombs buried in its soil, relatives scattered overseas, and development owed on someone else's books.
In the 1640s the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Maria Leria stayed in Vientiane for several years and left a valuable account of the kingdom of Lan Xang, but he founded no lasting community. From the late nineteenth century the Catholic Paris Foreign Missions Society entered Laos and established parishes along the Mekong and among Vietnamese communities. On the Protestant side, missionaries of the Swiss Brethren worked in the south from 1902 and took part in early translation of the Lao Bible; American Presbyterian missionaries had earlier traveled from northern Thailand into northern Laos; and the Christian and Missionary Alliance entered the north in the late 1920s.
The most unexpected chapter of the Lao church happened in the mountains. In the 1950s, notable group conversions took place among the Hmong in the northern mountains. Often an elder or a family accepted the gospel first, and the others followed together. For these peoples, believing in Jesus meant no longer fearing spirits who demanded sacrifices; the gospel was first heard as good news of freedom. For this reason faith took root among the upland peoples far more deeply than among the mainly Buddhist lowland Lao.
After 1975 all foreign missionaries left, many church leaders fled in the refugee exodus, and the believers who stayed lived under suspicion that Christianity was “the Americans' religion.” Today the officially recognized Christian bodies are the Catholic Church, the Lao Evangelical Church, and the Seventh-day Adventist Church; the constitution guarantees religious freedom, and religious activities must be registered and approved under regulations. In a society held together by village-wide rites, when one household changes faith it is often seen as withdrawing from the village. The pressure that faith brings tends to come first from kin and neighbors.
The number of Christians in Laos depends on how it is counted: the 2015 census recorded about 1.7 percent, and other estimates are somewhat higher. For Chinese readers, the nearest connection may lie in our own southwest: the Hmong of Laos belong to the same large ethnic family as China's Miao, though in different language branches, and more than a century ago the Miao around Shimenkan in Guizhou also experienced group conversions, saw Miao intellectuals and foreign missionaries create and spread a Miao script together, and founded schools. We can recognize their road from our own history, and for that very reason we should be careful: we will not turn their suffering into news or publish their names and locations, but walk with them in prayer, respect, and long friendship.