4 - Under Duress: Lao War Captives

Summary

OF LOVE AND LOATHING

Relations between Siam and the Lao states of the Mekong watershed soured during the Thonburi period (1767–1782). Whether that was primarily due to the dynamics of Burmese influence in the Lao country, the newly found might and exuberant expansionism of the Thonburi regime, or personal animosities between Thonburi's King Taksin and King Si Bunyasan of Vientiane remains a moot point. What is beyond dispute, however, is the political decline of the Lao states following the 1707 fragmentation of the kingdom of Lan Chang into the rival states of Luang Prabang, Vientiane, and Champasak, which deeply affected the capacity of the Lao to withstand pressure from their Siamese, Burmese, and Vietnamese neighbours. The result was a process of growing humiliation for the Lao at the hands of their Thai ethnic cousins (Wyatt 1994b). A respected pair of Lao scholars has succinctly expressed the lingering sentiments as a “Lao-Thai saga of love and loathing” (Mayoury and Pheuiphanh 1994, p. vii).

The roiling tensions between Thonburi and the Lao states led, in 1778–1779, to a powerful Thai military campaign against the Mekong riparian states, culminating in the conquest of the Lao capital of Vientiane and the capture and transport to Thai territory of large numbers of war prisoners (chaloei soek), including many members of the Vientiane royal family and its entourage. Si Bunyasan and several of his sons managed to escape the besieged capital into Vietnamese sanctuary. But his eldest son and viceroy (the uparat, nearly always the king's senior son or younger brother), Nanthasen, and other members of the royal family were caught and carried off to Siam along with masses of war captives and other booty, including the Phra Kaew and Phra Bang Buddha images, the chief palladia of the ancient Lao kingdom of Lan Chang. That conquest of Vientiane and its subordinate principalities marked a historic transition of the Lao states from political independence to tributary status to Siam, immortalized, to the lasting chagrin of the Lao, by the installation of the Phra Kaew Buddha image at Thonburi, Siam's spiritual centre.