So now I’ve been to the Plain of Jars. Among places, it has among the most evocative of names. It sounds so plain, yet so poetic, because we simply don’t associate any plain, or meadow, with jars, and we’re not talking about Mason ones here, but stone, and huge, with the largest ten feet tall and weighting 14 tons.
The average Lao man is only 5’3”, and the average woman, 4’11,” so these tiny people used iron tools to shape and hollow out thousands of these funerary urns made of sandstone, granite, conglomerate, limestone or breccia, except that they didn’t, because the current inhabitants of Laos weren’t here two thousand years ago, when these jars were made.
Laos have their own explanations. Some believe these jars were used by a race of giants to brew and store alcohol, in celebration of a hard-fought military victory. Whatever their size, they had the surplus time and wealth to make such expensive coffins.
Even when well-documented, history is filled with distortions, if not outright lies, and though some of our greatest achievements may survive our protean and often gleeful destruction, their significance is often lost.
The Plain of Jars has many more secrets, not least the CIA’s Secret War. Initiated by Eisenhower, it would be clandestinely sanctioned and escalated by Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. It was here that the “intelligence” agency became a rogue fighting force, accountable to neither the Pentagon nor Congress, much less the eternally clueless American public. Using unprecedented airpower and a proxy army, the Hmong, the CIA’s Secret War in Laos provided the template for other American interventions, down to our days. Instead of using troops to conquer an enemy, America would just bomb the targeted society into submission. It would be machine against flesh, often civilian. Drones have no conscience, never cower and cannot be mourned.
Tiny, thus weak, Laos has long been intruded on, however. Just since the 19th Century, this Land of a Million Elephants has been invaded by the Thais, Burmese and Vietnamese, not to mention the White Tais and their fearsome Chinese ally, the Black Flag Army.
Bet you haven’t heard of this punk band. Led by the Hakka Liu Yongfu, the Black Flag were bandits and mercenaries. Fighting against the French on behalf of the Vietnamese, it killed Francis Garnier, the conqueror of Hanoi. Always looking for a blood bath, Liu ended up in Taiwan in 1895, where he was immediately made a brigadier general of the fleeting Formosa Republic. Promptly defeated by the Japanese, Liu fled Taiwan on a British ship, disguised as a coolie. Don’t you believe, not even for a second, slanderous accounts that insist Liu was dressed as a hag. May the nearest black flag lance, repeatedly and with a twisting motion, such reckless rumor mongers!
Visiting Laos in 1950, Norman Lewis never made it to the Plain of Jars, for the roads were much worse then. Plus, there were the Khmer Issarak and Viet Minh guerrillas to avoid. With frightful understatement, here’s how Lewis describes an accident in his convoy, “On our right was a precipice, but the vegetation was so thick that you could get no idea of the drop […] we were nosing our way round the hill, keeping a lookout for occasional gaps in the road left by subsidences, when the lorry ahead suddenly turned off the road and went over the side. Gently, almost, it was lowered from sight amongst the bamboos. Up till the last fraction of a second before a thousand graceful stems screened it from our view it was still upright and quite level. The soldiers in it had hardly risen from their seats and raised their arms not so much in alarm, it seemed, as to wave farewell.” Even then, multiple deaths in Laos hardly registered.
My 10-hour minibus trip from Vientiane to Phonsavan, the portal to the Plain of Jars, was nowhere nearly as eventful, but with all the potholes and switchbacks on endless mountain passes, I disembarked feeling like hell anyway. I am not young.
Click for Full Text!