Imperial Evanescence in Laos

Down a dusty road on the outskirts of Vientiane, the capital of Laos, is a little-visited (at least by foreigners) museum commemorating the country’s communist figurehead Kaysone Phomvihane. 

The chief of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) from 1955 until his death in 1992, Kaysone occupies roughly the same position that Ho Chi Minh holds in Vietnam’s communist pantheon — which is to say he’s the guy on all the banknotes.

The Kaysone Phomvihane Memorial is housed in the leader’s former residence and headquarters, a squat bungalow screened by frangipani trees, located inside a sprawling LPRP compound.

On a drowsy day in late 2018, I paid a visit to the museum, parking my hired motorbike in the gravel next to trimmed hedges. Upon entering, I was intercepted by a guide named Thavan, a young woman in her 20s, who instructed me on the proper etiquette (no shoes) and proceeded to shepherd me through the various exhibits. 

“President Kaysone Phomvihane is the pillar of the Lao,” she said by way of introduction. “So after the president passed away, the Politburo members of Laos preserved this place like a memorial for the new generation come to learn from him.”

The museum extends a curious habit of Lao revolutionary hagiography: the strict preservation of the working and living environments of departed leaders. These are carefully crafted to look spontaneous, as if Kaysone had just run out for some errands and would be back for tea shortly.

The displays (and Thavan’s scripted accompaniment) laid a heavy emphasis on Kaysone’s humility and the rudimentary nature of his living and working arrangements. The former leader’s clothes hung in a wooden wardrobe, his papers on a desk were squared neatly, his shoes were lined up on the floor in parallel ranks. On a safe sat a faded bottle of Black and White Choice Old Scotch Whiskey, filled, Thavan said, with a local variety of herbal firewater.

Kaysone’s office was lined with knick-knacks from visiting leaders, a pair of mounted elephant tusks from Xaiyaburi, and an oil painting of the Lao leader bantering with Ho Chi Minh, presented as a birthday present by the Vietnamese government in 1990. A steel bookcase was filled with books, most of them Vietnamese.

The Kaysone Phomvihane Memorial was opened in late 1994, on the 74th anniversary of the leader’s birth. Its purpose, as the late anthropologist Grant Evans described it, was to communicate that the Lao communist leader “was a man not distracted by the trappings of the material world, but had a higher calling.” Or as Thavan informed me, “He only worked and worked. He didn't want to have money, cars, and land.”

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the museum, and the thing that prompted me to seek it out, is the compound in which it is housed. Once known as Kilometer 6, or KM-6, this was the former housing compound for staff of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), their families, and other American personnel.

Built in the mid-1960s, at the height of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, KM-6 aimed to reproduce the sylvan charms of American suburbia in a tense and deteriorating political environment. In 1969, the Far Eastern Economic Review described the compound’s “tree-lined streets filled with rows of ranchstyle houses, neatly trimmed lawns, backyard barbecues, block parties, and big cars in the driveways.”

KM-6 had its own power generators, water supply, and sewage system, along with tennis courts, a swimming pool, restaurant, bar, and cinema. It housed the American School of Vientiane, and its commissary was stocked with American goods. Known to its American inhabitants as “six clicks city,” the housing compound was linked to the center of town by a regular shuttle bus. The wife of a USAID worker described it as a “sterile moderate-income American housing development.”

With a few modifications, much of this remains intact today: the old General Electric Superline air conditioners are still in place, and sunlight dances through dust-filmed windows. Desks bear stickers reading “Victory Office Equipment,” and steel barrister bookshelves are marked “Jebco, Warrenton, GA, 1969.” (The same inscription adorns many of the U.S. Postal Service’s iconic blue postboxes.)

Much of the old USAID compound has been repurposed by the LPRP Politburo for its myriad functions, but some of the bungalows now seem abandoned, and slumber in overgrown gardens.

KM-6 also had another function. As the FEER’s correspondent Arnold Abrams noted, it was the biggest of several compounds where most of the 2,000-plus Americans in Laos could “seclude themselves from ‘indigenous elements.’” He added, “Aside from providing the conveniences of home, KM-6 and its companion compounds serve a subtle purpose that characterizes the U.S. presence in Laos: keeping the Americans out of sight.”

In the end, KM-6 only lasted as long as the American presence did. On May 21, 1975, the Washington Post reported, 100 young men seized the USAID headquarters in the center of town, “locking the gates and daubing ‘Americans go home’ on the walls of the buildings.” KM-6 was evacuated soon after, like the countless other American facilities in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia that were abandoned in the frenzied dash for the exits.

After their takeover in December 1975, the seclusion of KM-6 is probably also what recommended it to Kaysone and the Lao communist leadership. For years, they had lived rough, furtive lives in the maquis, hiding out in caves to avoid American bombing, and they probably saw political as well as practical benefits to living on the outskirts. 

Walking past the American-style bungalows, with their spiked and languid tropical flora, I recalled a conversation I had the year before with Wang Gungwu, a storied historian of China and its Southeast Asian diasporas. Wang, now 90 years old, was born in the Dutch East Indies, grew up in British Malaya, and saw European power rapidly lurch, he told me, from “a sense of absolute superiority to almost irrelevance.”

“In my own lifetime, they were number one,” he said of the British, Dutch, and French imperialists. “I mean, they took it for granted, and we took it for granted that they were unbeatable. And within a few decades, they're hardly relevant to our part of the world.”

Wang didn’t mention the Americans, but KM-6 — built, used, abandoned, and then infused with divergent meanings — symbolized the same imperial evanescence: the sense that what seems permanent can quickly, and unexpectedly, collapse. There’s perhaps a quiet rustle of warning here for the region’s currently ascendant power — China — whose presence in Laos is now more evident, and seemingly more durable, than the American one ever was.