Fa Ngum

Before Lan Xang the middle Mekong was a landscape of muang, small principalities held together by personal allegiance and tribute rather than by any single crown, and oriented variously toward Angkor, toward the Tai polities to the west, and toward Dai Viet. Fa Ngum's achievement was to weld them into one kingdom and to give that kingdom a religious ideology it had not previously possessed as a unified system.

His route to power ran through exile. His father was expelled from Muang Sua and the family found refuge at the Khmer court, where Fa Ngum was raised, educated and, the chronicles say, married to a Khmer princess. He returned in the middle of the fourteenth century with Khmer military backing, took the muang of the Mekong in sequence, and was consecrated at Muang Sua in 1353. The consecration is the point at which a Tai chieftaincy becomes a Buddhist kingship on the Khmer and Mon model, with the ruler positioned as protector of the religion and the religion in turn conferring legitimacy on the ruler.

The arrangement did not save him personally. He was deposed by his own officials around 1372, reportedly for conduct they judged intolerable, and died in exile at Nan. His son Samsenethai, whose regnal name records a census of three hundred thousand Tai, consolidated what his father had assembled. The Buddhist establishment Fa Ngum introduced outlasted both of them by six centuries, and the sangha remained tied to the Lao state through every subsequent change of regime, including the socialist one that abolished the monarchy in 1975.

The Phra Bang is a standing Buddha image about eighty centimetres high, cast in an alloy with a high gold content, with both palms raised in the gesture of dispelling fear. In the Lao account it came from Ceylon to Angkor and from Angkor to Fa Ngum, arriving with a delegation of monks who brought the Pali canon and the ordination lineage with them. It became the object on which the kingdom's fortune was held to depend, was carried off twice by Siamese armies and returned twice, and gave the capital the name it still bears.

The account is not contemporary. The Lao chronicles were compiled from the sixteenth century onward, and their treatment of the fourteenth is a mixture of record, dynastic claim and hagiography. Historians of Laos accordingly separate what the chronicles say happened from what the chronicles are doing: a founding king who receives the religion, the canon and a palladium from the greatest court of the region is a story that legitimates a dynasty, and it is told in the same terms in several neighbouring kingdoms. The image itself has been dated by art historians on stylistic grounds to a period later than Fa Ngum, which if correct places its arrival after the reign the chronicles assign it to.

None of that makes the establishment fictional. Theravada Buddhism of the Sinhalese ordination line did spread through mainland Southeast Asia in exactly this period and by exactly this mechanism, courts importing monks and texts from a prestigious centre. What is uncertain is the timetable and the personal role of the founding king, not the process.