Explore the rich cultural tapestry of Laos through its national anthem, "Pheng Xat Lao," which serves as a powerful reflection of the country's journey from colonialism to independence and socialism. This episode takes listeners on a fascinating journey, tracing the historical and political context that shaped both the anthem and the nation itself. Discover the significance of the anthem's lyrics, which evolved from a celebration of royal heritage and Buddhist values to a modern emphasis on unity, equality, and resilience among the Lao people. The narrative weaves through the impacts of French colonialism, the struggles during the Vietnam War, and the eventual establishment of the Lao People's Democratic Republic. Join us as we delve into the music, lyrics, and stories that highlight Laos's identity and the enduring spirit of its people.

1. https://nationalanthems.info/la.htm 
2. https://www.countryreports.org/country/Laos/nationalsymbols.htm 
3. https://wpkn.org/wpkn-programming/soundprint-asia/ 
4. https://www.jwpepper.com/Laos-PDR-National-Anthem/11408775.item?srsltid=AfmBOopwSlTsETN-sYgiEb5lvjZ2-fAqUFgAxw1qW5UMqeCqwK0HfFYs 
5. https://www.worldatlas.com/flags/lao-people-s-democratic-republic 
6. https://web.archive.org/web/20101229000748/https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/la.html 
7. https://www.weathernationtv.com/2016/06/29/welcome-monsoon-season-probably-using-term-wrong 
8. https://books.google.pl/books?id=5r3QDwbZ_ZkC&pg=PT373&dq=Thongdy+Sounthonevichit&hl=pl&sa=X&ei=N9CoUYrOIMjPiwLhwoHoCg&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAg#v=snippet&q=laos&f=false 
9. https://faculty.washington.edu/plape/citiesaut11/readings/Fletcher-water%20management%20in%20angkor%20Antiquity%202008.pdf
10. https://web.archive.org/web/20101110175658/http://indochinatrek.com/laos/lao-guides.html 
11. https://books.google.pl/books?id=d5ZGAQAAIAAJ&q=Thongdy+Sounthonevichit&dq=Thongdy+Sounthonevichit&hl=pl&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiPieqf_JjtAhWwCRAIHUOQAcUQ6AEwBXoECAcQAg 
12. Stuart-Fox, Martin (2008). Historical Dictionary of Laos. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-81086-411-5.
13. https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/transcript-reception-between-vice-premier-chen-yi-and-delegation-laos 
14. http://www.reninc.org/bookshelf/history_of_laos_manich.pdf 
15. https://web.archive.org/web/20121028211230/https://sayasackp.free.fr/traite.htm 
16. \https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/history/A%20Short%20History%20of%20Laos.pdf 
17. https://kpl.gov.la/en/detail.aspx?id=70856 
18. https://hmong.in.th/wiki/Pheng_Xat_Lao#google_vignette 
19. https://www.nytimes.com/1976/09/09/archives/laos-bans-birth-control-to-build-population-after-a-decade-of-war.html 
20. https://songbpm.com/@glocal-orchestra/laos---pheng-xat-lao---laotian-national-anthem-hymn-of-the-lao-people 
21. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,826920-1,00.html 
22. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Laos_in_Pictures/qkuSVaUuiVgC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=pheng+xat+lao&pg=PA69&printsec=frontcover 
23. http://www.unforgettable-laos.com/governing-system-in-m-rii/4-3-administrative-system/ 
24. https://republicordeath.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/anthem-of-the-day-laos/ 
25. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Youth_Mobilization_in_Vichy_Indochina_an/w8hy1pzrc0sC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA137&printsec=frontcover 
26. www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2007/R949.pdf 
27. https://www.dw.com/en/a-dam-building-race-threatens-the-mekong-river/a-50049206 
28. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Revolution_Reform_and_Regionalism_in_Sou/uBquBoKAytYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=laos+national+anthem&pg=PA1780&printsec=frontcover 
29. https://lilisisombat.substack.com/p/un-pere-fondateur-pres-de-chez-vous 
30. https://books.google.pl/books?id=d9hO4dWSqp4C&pg=PA56&dq=Sisana+Sisane&hl=pl&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjkp4ivhpntAhUnmYsKHdhYDlMQ6AEwAHoECAAQAg#v=onepage&q=Sisana%20Sisane&f=false 
31. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Spirits_of_the_Place/a72gff91-u0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=laos+national+anthem&pg=PA133&printsec=frontcover 
32. https://www.sailmalaysia.life/country/laos 
33. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1718200/releaseinfo/?ref_=tt_dt_dt#akas

Foreign hello and welcome to the Anthems Podcast. I'm Patrick and I'm here to tell you the story of a song that that helps to tell the story of a nation.

That means we're actually going to have to go a couple of thousand miles further than that as we head up and across the Atlantic and make a stop at the Cape of Good Hope. Then we head across the Indian Ocean to the Strait of Malacca and we pass through to the South China Sea.

From there you can dock in Bangkok and take a breather because you just spent like four months on the water and you're about to make a nine hour drive north to get to our final destination, Laos. Officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic.

We are here in the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia because of a radio station that I listen to. They play music from all over the world and it's not uncommon for me to hear music from each of the populated continents in a single day.

Obviously I am a fan of the place and it's an occasional source of inspiration for episodes or long musical explorations. One program is specifically music from Asia and the day I was listening I happened to catch some music from Laos.

I couldn't tell you what I heard because this was a while ago due to the asynchronous nature of the show that you're listening to right now. And it was also like a 45 minute long segment with a whole bunch of stuff in it.

However, it was all a brand new kind of music for my ears and of course it got me wondering about the anthem. And that gave me an excuse to tell you about Feng Zat Lao or the Song of the Lao People before beginning the reading for this episode.

I knew very little about laos or the 6.368 million people that call it home. And almost all of that was based on what pop culture and the American public education system in the 80s and 90s had to say about the Vietnam War.

Suffice to say, this has been yet another exercise in dispelling a non trivial amount of ignorance for me. That's my favorite part of the show actually, because I would like to know more about all of the things, literally all of them.

So before we get to learning more about the fall of colonialism and a country that has 14,000 Buddhist temples, which is the most in the world, you first get to spend about a minute and 20 seconds learning how the anthem sounds.

Enjoy LA my initial thought is that, stylistically speaking, we're back into more familiar territory with Feng Zat Lao with a song, it sounds way more, I don't know, ceremonial. It's certainly less surprising as an anthem than episode 24.

Rather than something that is simple, direct and charming, we get a song that sounds like an elaborate proclamation full of celebratory honor, a much more common route for an anthem to go along.

Yet even here we get some immediate stuff that I dig and things that aren't always there, like a local feel to the song and a group of enthusiastic amateurs singing it.

There's a lot to talk about and piece together this time, but first we need to know where on earth that months long boat trip we took to get here actually got us.

As stated earlier on, the Lao People's Democratic Republic is the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia, and if you can reliably find it on a map, then you knew more than I did a few weeks ago. Visually, I guess we're just gonna have to find China and India. They're big countries and I've been using them as mental waypoints in geography.

In between the two are a group of nine nations and we find Laos as the second country in from Vietnam from the South China Sea.

That country is also the entire eastern border of Laos, as well as some of the northern one, with the remainder of the north split roughly equally between Myanmar and China.

Most of the western border with Thailand is described by the Mekong, which is the 12th longest river in the world and another place that I spent a whole bunch of time reading about. The southern border is taken by Cambodia. The mountainous terrain and the rivers and jungles have resulted in Laos having an interesting shape.

It vaguely resembles a palm tree to me. Palm trees are in fact native to Laos and they spend a lot of time getting blown around in the monsoon season.

And since I realized once I read what they were that I had no idea what a monsoon actually was, that gets to be the new to me fact in episode 25 contrary to what was in my head, a monsoon is not just a kind of tropical rainstorm and has a specific meteorological meaning.

It describes a seasonal change in atmospheric circulation and precipitation associated with annual latitudinal oscillation of the Intertropical Convergence Zone.

For the people like me that are not meteorologists and have no idea what that means is that a weather system in the region varies from year to year and involves lots of wind from one direction and a rainy season Interesting stuff, even if I still don't know why it happens. Moving on and moving on to colonialism. Again, it happens a lot here. I don't always know ahead of time and I'm not surprised any longer.

But I am amazed at the depth of the footprint that this stuff has left. In this case, we are again talking about a place that the French tried to shape and exploit, but mostly just the exploit part here.

And again, it kind of determines where we are going to enter the timeline. They first arrived in the area to explore up and along the Mekong to try and find a direct shipping route from the sea to China.

The general assumption was that French engineering and strategic railroad placement would make the rapid laden river a manageable route. I have no idea if that was a successful endeavor, but I'm going to guess that it was not.

This three year event is not super relevant enough to wade into properly here, but I will note that the leader Chao Anuvong represents to this day a potent symbol of the Lao people's defiance and national identity.

As a result of the rebellion, the Siamese leveled the capital city and over the course of the 60 or so years, next 60 or so years would depopulate the east bank regions of the Mekong by as much as 80%. Most of this loss was due to punitive population transfers into Siam.

But a sizable group of people were straight up kidnapped in repeated slave raids from a few different countries.

That prompted the French to do the colonial thing where they expression interest in quote, providing stability in the region to protect their local interests. But what they were really doing was trying to counter Britain's growing control of Burma and increased Siamese influence.

I will note that this is Thai spelled T A I recall the Kingdom of Thailand does not exist yet and this is an ethnic group that includes the Thai that live in Thailand and the Lao people. It's interesting to read about, but it's too complicated to get into and not super relevant to this story anyway.

This gave the French an opportunity to try and expand Indochina from modern Vietnam and Cambodia all the way up to the banks of the Mekong. But first they had to do some literal gunboat diplomacy, wherein they repeatedly and deliberately escalated hostilities with Siam.

We'll talk about a little bit of that in a few minutes.

After Japan gained control of the area and on the way to them being kicked out, they began pressuring the king to declare Laos independent in April. He did just that, and most of the disparate independence groups coalesced into the Lao Esarah, or Free Laos movement.

The French were not interested in any of that, obviously, and things rapidly escalated into a couple wherein the royal family was imprisoned and a new government was declared.

It was a really short run and six months later the administration was forced by the French to flee to Thailand, where a communist faction called the Pathet Lao split off. We're going to put a pin in the path at Laos. The end of the Franco Laos General Convention.

Feng Sat Lao was chosen as the most appropriate of the many patriotic songs written in the run up to actually getting to independence. I'm going to read out the original lyrics as well as the current.

When I get to the usual place where I do that, I thought about not reading both sets. But in order to understand the current lyrics, I think we need to talk about both versions of them.

All I can say confidently about his early life is that he studied music in Vietnam and Thailand.

The next year Sissane was arrested with a bunch of other opposition leaders and jailed, although a lot of them escaped from the Fankeng prison.

And probably right about when he penned the lyrics for Feng Zat Lao, he was The Minister of Propaganda, Information, Culture and Tourism, as well as the head of the Institute for Scientific and Social Research, another impressively long title. I find it difficult to imagine that one person was actually effective with such a wide range of responsibilities.

When Cesanna died, he was written about as a great politician, a man of culture, and a social activist for the people.

To finish getting to the point, I first need to circle back around and pull the pin so we can find out a bit about how the Kingdom of Laos became the Lao People's Republic.

The Path at Lao arose after the split of the Lao Isara while exiled in Thailand, and largely from the efforts of another person in the interesting enough to read about category or have another show about him. And I'm going to say his name wrong. I apologize. Prince Sufan Vong.

After an extended stay in Vietnam, he married a native, hung out with Ho Chi Minh, and secured aid to start a guerrilla force from the Viet Minh.

With that aid, the Prince and other Pathetlau fighters accompanied an invasion from the south, and they were able to establish a government, make inroads, and start a civil war in Laos.

With that and the knowledge that of course the propaganda minister was going to write the anthem, and of course he chose a composition that had deep cultural meaning already. So now we have our song, and I can go on to discuss it.

Musically speaking, we have a song that sounds like the place it's from, which makes me happy, because there is a danger that a former colony of the French and now communist country would have a song that essentially rips off the anthem from France or China.

Instead, we are greeted with an exuberant and well paced, at around 140 beats per minute song that is properly East Asian folk music that leads to elements of the pentatonic scale in the music. And I'm almost always a fan of Pentatonic music.

I've heard versions played at half time or double time as well, but all of them are played in E flat major, which is fun because I'm not sure we've had an E flat major key yet on this show. It is an appropriate key though, because in a post Beethoven world that is associated with heroic bold music.

Recall that Feng Zat Lau was a deliberately patriotic song, even though it was not deliberately written to be an anthem and it was penned at a time with a local maximum in nationalism that was being deliberately fomented by at least three different groups of people. It doesn't shock me that this song, with its 44 time sig, singable pace and danceable rhythm was picked as the anthem.

Lyrically, we have two sets of lyrics. Like I said earlier, I think we need to talk about both of them.

Sometimes discussing earlier versions of the song does not turn out to be useful in my opinion, but here I think it's going to help us understand what Sasana wrote to know what Tongdi wrote.

Structurally speaking, they are deliberately very close and use the same rhyme scheme with three verses of four lines apiece followed by a two line wrapping it up verse. There might be a poetry name for the structure, but I don't know it and I don't want to get too lost in the reeds here.

Both of them are originally written in Lao, but I of course will be reading in English and using the literal translation for both, so stuff is not gonna rhyme. I flipped the coin and we're gonna start with the original lyrics.

In the old days our Lao people were famous all over Asia because the Lao were united in love. Still today they love their people and country and rally around their kings.

They preserve the religion of their fathers and protect the soil of their ancestors. They will never allow another nation to threaten them or to occupy their territory.

Every enemy who enters their country, we find them ready to fight until death. Altogether they can restore the ancient glory of their blood and they will stand together in the days of danger.

The entire people will safeguard the independence and the freedom of the Lao nation. They are resolved to struggle for victory in order to lead the nation to prosperity.

There are some common themes and specific contrasts in the lyrics. We have a call for pride in both of them. In the original writing, the pride comes from the nation's rich past heritage.

It's mostly reaching back to draw inspiration from a time when Laos was more culturally prominent in Asia. The current version looks in entirely the other direction for pride.

It emphasizes a collective, forward looking viewpoint, focusing on the enduring spirit of the Laotian people, which makes a lot of sense to me.

Recall, we're in a nation that was occupied by the colonial French, then wracked by a civil war, then dragged into parts of the Vietnam War and the Second Indochina War, all the while managing to maintain a distinct cultural identity. The writing projects resilience and confidence in a self determined future for the people of Laos.

Both sets of lyrics tout the unity and collective identity of the people, but there are strong differences in how the writers do this. In the original, it's framed as a unifying love for the monarch and the official religion, which was Buddhism. It is strongly implied.

Loyalty is a cornerstone of national cohesion. Doing your duty to God and country, as they say in some western nations.

But there is oppression, and I bet the Hmong people have a few things to say about how the Pathet Lao treat the ones that they don't want there, because it has not been great. National defense and sovereignty are frequently covered themes in national anthems, and Feng Zat Lao puts them to good use.

Fighting to the death to protect your culture and way of life seems like a fairly natural reaction to having your homeland ravaged for decades by outside forces. It actually does come up in quite a few anthems.

The socialist lyrics, though, are not explicitly violent, but they do project a resolute determination. They also kind of preserve sovereignty as a mechanism, but in this case it's more a product of the Lao people rather than a single monarch.

The current version is very much a product of the time and the place. Just south of China in a communist country well into the Cold War.

The people need to be vigilant against the internal threat of betrayal, which I think really means anybody not supporting the party is the enemy.

Based on my reading about other communist countries, plus there is the anti imperialist message, which in the case of this anthem refers very specifically to France and the United States because they are respectively the colonial occupiers and the country that turned Laos into the most bombed place on the entire planet.

The posture of many a socialist state in the middle of the 70s was all about resisting external influence and perceiving it as a threat to the state's independence in an effort to unite the people. The current lyrics run with that theme right through and there is a focus on collective progress that will modernize the country.

The lyrics remain mostly secular, explicitly political and forward looking, a stark shift from the original intent of traditional values, Buddhist principles and apolitical tone that looked at past glories. It is an appropriate anthem and an appropriate song in my opinion. Overall, I found it interesting to read for and write up.

We've got a song that is an anthem, but also a narrative of the cultural evolution in Laos from colony to monarchy to socialist state, from religious to mostly secular, and attempting to be inclusive as long as you're in the party rather than exclusive to a single ethnic group. This one was something different, even though it manages to remain inside many traditional anthem corridors.

And with that it sounds an awful lot like I'm about to say it's time for the credits. The writing, recording and production for this show are done by me. I wrote and played the theme music and then I used it with my own permission.

Unless otherwise noted, the anthems I play are public domain or something free, a thing I got permission to play or have made a good faith effort to get permission to play.

It is a post about the show and if you see these posts you can share those posts. Plus it puts you in a pretty exclusive club because not a lot of people follow me. Being in exclusives clubs is kind of cool.

I have basically no advertising budget, so I try to get the episodes onto whatever platform I can.

With the hashtag anthemspod, it would be cool if you hashtag the post of some kind and maybe it means that the Laotian effort at fighting deforestation becomes more successful.

Or better still, leave me a review wherever you can so more people hear me or give me a rating on your podcast app for the same reason. It really helps. Maybe you're the manager at a gigantic store and you accidentally play this very episode for everyone shopping.

But even if all that happens is you listen to one more I hope you like it, because I like it and I'm enjoying what I'm doing. Next month you'll hear me again.