Laos

The Land of a Million Elephants, from the Mekong kingdom of Lan Xang through French Indochina and the most bombed nation on earth to a one-party socialist republic.

Laos is a landlocked Southeast Asian nation whose history flows along the Mekong River, settled by Tai-Lao peoples amid the older Mon and Khmer civilizations of the region. In 1353 the warrior-prince Fa Ngum unified the Lao principalities into the kingdom of Lan Xang, the "million elephants," which embraced Theravada Buddhism and reached its height before fracturing in the early 18th century into the rival kingdoms of Luang Prabang, Vientiane, and Champasak, all soon falling under Siamese suzerainty. France absorbed the Lao lands east of the Mekong into a protectorate from 1893 as part of French Indochina, and Laos achieved full sovereignty by the Franco-Lao Treaty of 22 October 1953. Decades of civil war and the covert American bombing of the "Secret War" ended only when the communist Pathet Lao abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the Lao People's Democratic Republic on 2 December 1975, the one-party socialist state that, opening cautiously to markets and regional trade, governs Laos today.