Haw Pha Bang (Royal Temple, Luang Prabang)

The Phra Bang is a small standing figure of the Buddha, about 83 centimetres tall, both hands raised in the gesture of dispelling fear, cast in a precious alloy of gold, silver and bronze. Lao tradition traces it to Sri Lanka and holds that it reached the Lao kingdom through the Khmer court, given to King Fa Ngum, founder of Lan Xang, in the fourteenth century; art historians reading its style tend to date the image itself somewhat later, but its symbolic history is what matters.

As the palladium of the kingdom, the image was believed to guarantee the legitimacy and prosperity of whoever held it, and the royal capital took its name from the relic, Luang Prabang meaning the great, or royal, Phra Bang. To possess the image was to possess the mandate to rule the Lao, which is why its fate was so closely bound to that of the monarchy, and why rival powers coveted it. The Haw Pha Bang exists to give this national relic a home worthy of that role.

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.

The purpose-built Haw Pha Bang stands in the northeast corner of the Royal Palace grounds, begun in 1963 under the last kings as a fitting shrine for the national image. The 1975 revolution, which abolished the monarchy and turned the palace into a museum, left the temple a bare shell for decades; only from the 1990s, as the government softened its stance toward Buddhism and Luang Prabang was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage town in 1995, did work resume, and the gilded, multi-tiered haw was completed in 2006. Its steep roofs, gilt stucco and naga-flanked stairways make it a showpiece of Lao temple architecture, if a modern one. The Phra Bang is now enshrined inside, and each Lao New Year in April it is brought out and ceremonially bathed in scented water, a rite in which the well-being of image and nation are renewed together, watched by crowds who regard the little Buddha as the guardian of the country.