Because the image conferred legitimacy, capturing it was a way of capturing sovereignty. When Siamese armies sacked Vientiane, to which the Phra Bang had been moved, they twice carried the image away to the Siamese court, in 1779 and again in 1827, holding it as a trophy of Lao submission. On both occasions it was eventually returned, the final restitution coming in 1867, after which the image settled at Luang Prabang. There it was housed not in a temple of its own but in existing monasteries, principally Wat Wisunarat and later Wat Mai, whose ornate facade served as its shrine on ceremonial occasions. The repeated seizures left a lasting sense that the nation's fortunes rose and fell with the image, and some Lao held that the copies made during its captivity muddied the question of which figure was the true Phra Bang, a doubt that only deepened the relic's mystique.
The Phra Bang's origin legend holds the image was cast in Sri Lanka before reaching the Khmer court at Angkor, and only reaching Fa Ngum, founder of Lan Xang, when the Khmer king who had raised him in exile sent it as a gift on his return to found a kingdom in the fourteenth century, a chain of transmission impossible to verify but that supplied Lao kingship with a claim of connection to the wider Theravada Buddhist world. Its repeated captivities in Siam were not simple trophies: nineteenth-century Siamese court chronicles frame possession of the image as evidence of Vientiane's subordinate status, so its 1867 return coincided with a period of French colonial pressure reshaping the regional balance. The 2006 completion of the Haw Pha Bang, decades after the monarchy that commissioned it was abolished, shows a Communist government choosing to complete a royal Buddhist shrine.