Won in War, and Still Claimed by the Loser

The Emerald Buddha reached Bangkok by conquest rather than gift or purchase: it had been kept in Vientiane, in what is now Laos, since the sixteenth century, after the Lao king Setthathirat brought it from Chiang Mai when he moved his court, and it remained the palladium of the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang for over two centuries. When the Siamese general who became Rama I captured Vientiane during the Siamese-Lao wars of the 1770s, he took the image south as war booty, along with other symbols of Lao royal legitimacy, installing it in Bangkok once he took the Siamese throne himself.

Laos has periodically raised the image's removal as an unresolved historical grievance, and some Lao cultural commentators and officials have called at various points for its return, framing the request in terms similar to other restitution disputes covered elsewhere in this atlas, an object taken as the spoils of a war between unequal neighbours rather than acquired through any process either side would call consensual. Thailand has not returned the image and shows no indication of considering it, and the matter remains an occasional point of diplomatic friction rather than an active negotiation, one the atlas records as unresolved rather than closed by the image's two and a half centuries in Bangkok.