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Secrets of the Stone Jars
A travel feature about new discoveries in one of Asia’s prime emerging tourist destinations
We have trudged for three hours up steep forest paths, but the hidden mausoleums awaiting us on the mountaintop are worth every arduous step. Draped in vegetation and speckled with lichen, hundreds of weathered stone urns lie strewn about, each large enough for a person to climb inside. The 416 “jars”- most long since emptied of their contents but generally held to be burial vessels - constitute the largest cluster of megalithic relics ever found in the larger Plain of Jars, a sprawling archeological site in the wilds of Laos’ northern Xieng Khouang province. They are all that remains of a prehistoric civilization that vanished about 2,000 years ago, and their presence here suggests that these hills were prosperously settled once; some believe that the ridge we’re standing on was part of an ancient caravan route that extended from northern India to China. But as civilizations rise, so too do they fall. Now the forest has taken over, and the present scattering of villages - including the nearby Hmong settlement of Ban Phakeo where we will spend the night - offers scant evidence of the area’s prosperous heyday.
Leading our party is Khamman Phimmasan, a government official who oversees heritage preservation at the Plain of Jars. “It might have taken a month to carve a single jar using hammer and chisel,” he tells me as we contemplate the granite and sandstone urns. Some still stand upright, two to three meters proud of the ground; others lie on their sides, locked in the embrace of tree roots. A few lids, some incised with carvings of monkeys and humans, are scattered among the jars, but most have disappeared - generations of Hmong have broken the capstones to cover their mound graves set among the jars. It’s certainly an idyllic resting place for the spirits of the dead, a place where someone could take flight; the lofty vista reveals mountains straggling all the way to the horizon in every direction.
The discovery of this site in 2003 has created a considerable stir among the scientific community. Archeologists are conducting earnest research; UNESCO, which began mapping Xieng Khouang’s jar fields in 1998, is implementing tourism-management plans; and the Hmong are now paid to keep the vegetation around the jars cut back. The entire Plain of Jars, a vast plateau stretching to the south where there are hundreds more jars, is already short-listed as a World Heritage Site, a designation expected to become official in two years time. It’s one of the most incredible emerging tourist attractions in Asia.
Visiting the jar site on the mountain, which officially opened for tourism at the beginning of 2006, entails an overnight stay at Ban Phakeo, almost 3 hours walk from the nearest road (and an hour’s drive from the nondescript provincial capital of Phonsovan). The village is an attraction in its own right, its rustic, stockade-enclosed wooden houses home to a tight-knit community of 180 people. A trail of giggling children follows us as we pay our respects first to the chief, and then to the spirit doctor.
The spirit doctor, Tangchai Yang, a wiry man of 70, discovered his vocation after curing himself of a long and crippling illness. We’re invited to take a seat in his smoky, windowless one-room house. A fire glows in the middle of the floor, casting flickering shadows across a shelf cluttered with blackened pots and a simple shrine of colored paper and dried grass. “I make ceremonial offerings to the spirits every month,” he tells me through an interpreter. His main chore is to keep the peace among the bewildering array of spirits that inhabits the mountains. “Many children become sick from spirit curses,” he says. “Then I have to mediate with the spirit curser. I would offer the spirit things to appease him. I offer him a pig, and if he’s not happy with a pig, I offer him a cow. Then I kill the animal, leave the head to the spirit, and distribute the meat among our people.”
There are no wrathful spirits to appease tonight, and so no pork or beef either. We hunker down instead for a meal of chicken fried in ginger and rice. Then it’s time for bed, which turns out to be a duvet smelling of dog-hide covering a wooden frame. Sharing my room was the household dog whose bed I had usurped, but I suppose he still slept better than my fitful slumber.
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The Western world learned of the jars existence only in the early 20th century, with the first systematic study conducted in the 1930s by French archeologist Madeleine Colani. While the culture that produced these megalithic vessels remains shrouded in mystery, the jars themselves are generally thought to have been used as mortuary vessels in which bodies were placed to decompose, then removed for ceremonial cremation, and eventually the ashes and remains placed in smaller bowl and buried underneath the jars along with personal or symbolic possessions. It’s a theory that’s wholly accepted by archeologists, although the local people continue to believe the legend that the jars were made by a powerful ruler for the fermentation and storage of Lao Khao, the strong home-made vernacular rice whiskey.
“We found artifacts such as bracelets and necklaces, earthenware pots, and pipes for smoking,” Khamman tells me when I ask him about the excavations of burial pots that were conducted in the late 1990s, during which he assisted the Lao archeologist Thongsa Sayavongkhamdy. They also found bones in burial urns that have been carbon-dated to between 3,000 and 4,000 B.C., much earlier than the time the jars are thought to have been made, between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D.
“We need more dateable material before we can come up with answers,” says Julie Van Den Bergh, a Belgian archeologist and UNESCO consultant based in Hong Kong. “When we better historical timing then then we can compare with neighbors where archeological investigations have been conducted over a longer period. There are so many unknowns at present. What was this civilization doing? For how long? And why did it come to an end? You see, we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.”
Scratching the surface is risky business given the explosive detritus of the American war in Indochina. Part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the supply route used by North Vietnamese forces, ran through Xieng Khouang province, and the mountain-ringed Plain of Jars was a stronghold of both the Vietcong and the communist Pathet Lao guerillas. Between 1964 and 1973, during a relentless U.S. aerial campaign that saw some 13,000 sorties every month, the plateau became allegedly the most intensively bombed place on earth in the history of warfare. The 1,500 building in Xieng Khouang were obliterated in one day - Phonsovan was built to replace it in the mid-1970s - along with numerous villages and untold archeological treasures.
Cluster bombs - canisters that opened in midair to release hundreds of shrapnel-filled, tennis-ball–sized “bomblets” - accounted for much of the deaths then, and still do now especially among children who find them and play with them. The UXOs (shorthand for unexploded ordnance) killed or maimed at least 20,000 since the end of the war, and that’s just the ones that reported in hospitals. But conditions are slowly improving. Two organizations—Britain’s Mines Advisory Group (MAG) and UXO Lao, the national bomb-clearance organization—are working full-time to locate and destroy unexploded ordinance. MAG has already cleared the Plain of Jars’ main fields—Sites 1, 2, and 3, which together comprise more than 500 jars and constitute one of Laos’ major tourist draws—and are now at work on another four sites that feature, along with Ban Phakeo, in UNESCO’s tourism plans.
Needless to say, visiting the Plain of Jars isn’t for everyone. But war ruins—including a charred stupa and a temple whose roof was blown off—have become fixtures on the local tourist trail, and the package of attractions is steadily getting bigger (the complex of caves used as war-time headquarters by the Pathet Lao in nearby Huaphan Province opened for visitors in late 2005). In Phonsovan, arrays of bombshells are the most pervasive design motif in restaurants and guesthouses.
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“The growth has been amazing in the past decade,” says Sanya Vincent, owner of the hilltop Auberge de la Plaine des Jarres, my hotel in Phonsovan. We’re on the Auberge’s terrace, surveying a swath of handsome new brick homes. The growth in tourism—24,000 visitors in 2005, up from 15,000 in 2004—is fuelling the building boom. The hotel, built in 1990, is Phonsovan’s oldest and still the best; Sanya is the only internationally trained hotelier in the province. “Tourism is booming, but the infrastructure is still weak,” says Sanya. “Officials want to upgrade the golf course, yet there are still no street signs to lead visitors to the jars. I have to draw my guests a map.”
Several sights are scheduled to open for tourists as soon as the bombs are cleared. One of the most spectacular is the large jar-making site in the mountains at Phuken, found by Thongsa and Khamman in 1998. It takes our party – which includes Khamman and Long Vang, guide and interpreter - 30 minutes to get there from Phonsovan, cutting across farmland and streams on a rutted road only manageable by four-wheel-drive vehicles (we’re riding, not without a little irony, in a reconditioned U.S. Army jeep). The mountainside is dotted by dozens of jars in various stages of completion. Jars made at Phukeng were hauled to Site 1, eight kilometers away, an incredible feat given their size: the largest jar at Site 1 weighs six tons.
UXOs aside - as a hideout of the Pathet Lao the mountain was heavily mined and bombed, and has yet to be fully cleared - Phukeng is a scenic spot. Spread in front of us is the Plain of Jars: a grassy landscape, studded by pine trees, undulating toward the faint mountains that serrate the distant horizon. We sit in the grass and unpack our picnic - sticky rice, deep-fried pork, pork stew, papaya salad - and I imagine the ringing echo of jar-creators gouging out the boulders with hammer and chisel thousands of years ago. It was slow, complicated work, hollowing out the jars chip by chip. Damn the ones that cracked during construction, the ones abandoned in Phukeng. And then there was still the tortuous task of carrying the jars across the plain. “Did they carry them by elephants?” Khamman muses. “Did they mount them on wooden rafts trundled on round stones or logs? It’s one of the greatest mysteries.”
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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