KNIGHTED IN THE KINGDOM OF THE DIVINE BUDDHA
Luang Prabang, venerable capital of the ancient kingdom of the same
name, is a spacious town of a few wide French streets, softly paved, if
at all, with narrow Laosian streets like lovers’ lanes between them. It
is well wooded, with roomy yards usually whispering with palm-trees. In
other words it is not a city at all, in the crowded, noisy, Western
sense, but a leisurely congregation of separate dwellings of simple
lines, each in its ample garden-park, or at least with sufficient ground
so that its opinions or doings need not interfere with its neighbors. In
short Luang Prabang town is in many ways what idealists picture the
cities of Utopia to be, whatever insurance companies may think of the
fire-risks involved in more thatch than tile roofs. It sits on a bank of
the upper Mekong, more exactly the Me Nam Khong, that snaky
dividing-line between Siam and at least half of Indo-China, which in
time becomes one of the most important rivers of the Far East. Just here
it happens that it is not the dividing-line, for a large chunk of Luang
Prabang kingdom lies on the Siamese side of the river. Tiresome persons
of statistical temperament tell us that the capital stands 340 meters,
about 1135 feet, above sea-level; but one would hardly know it from the
number of overcoats required. In fact, though it was still April, my
host the _commissaire_ knew the futility of expecting a guest from the
temperate zone to sleep until he had been cooled off with a jaunt by
Ford through the tepid after-dinner night.
There were two Fords in Luang Prabang, that which had come for me at
Don-mo and one belonging to the king. It would of course have been bad
manners for the _commissaire_ openly to emphasize his real bosshood by
sporting the better car; besides, the garage mechanics of the capital
are as inexperienced as filling-stations are rare; hence the
transportation that had been placed at my disposal lacked something of
the regality of its rival, particularly in the matter of diligent
polishing. There were also some horses, a few elephants, several
victorias, even three or four rickshaws, though these, except perhaps
that of the king inside the palace grounds, might as well not have been
imported, for there were no men in this languid Eden both able and
willing to pull them. Nearly every one walks in Luang Prabang,
barefooted and silent, unless he travels by boat. For the most important
conveyances are the long narrow pirogues, some of them surprisingly
large, hollowed out of single tree-trunks, which ply the Mekong and the
Nam-khan that flows into it above the town. On the bow of each boat
there is almost sure to be a bouquet of flowers, a pretty custom, even
if it is probably based on a superstition, and one in keeping with this
gentle people of a land so kindly treated by nature. Huge fish are
caught in the Mekong, weighing a hundred and fifty, two hundred,
sometimes even two hundred and fifty—not pounds, but kilograms, fish so
big that it takes ten men to carry one of them and one man to carry a
severed head. It is easy to understand what the flap of such a fish-tail
sometimes means to the fishermen in their frail vine-tied canoes. But it
is just the fishing for such a people in such a climate; for every time
they catch a fish they can—and usually do—rest for a week without going
hungry. Racing pirogues as much as twenty paces long lie bottom up on
bamboo-horses under little thatch roofs here and there upon the high
weed-grown river-bank at the edge of the capital, being used only in
November during the annual regattas. For rowing—more exactly paddling—is
the athletic sport of Luang Prabang.
The main street of the capital, dying out at either end in semi-jungle,
is lined by a long market, facing the entrance to the king’s palace. But
for that matter there is a market just outside the royal palace in
Madrid, too, and many beggars also, which here seem to be unknown,
unless we count the yellow-clad priests sauntering along with their
begging-bowls in the early morning. Even such an Eden as this is not
without its serpents, however; and rattling chains on the legs of
prisoners working about the town make strange contrast both to its quiet
gentle atmosphere and to the regality of its king. The gay garments,
especially of the female branch of the population, make doubly
picturesque the market and the long lanes of greenery that represent
streets. The women of Luang Prabang capital, unlike their country
sisters in the rest of the kingdom, usually wear a thin silk or cotton
scarf of bright color over their bare breasts, half covering them, and
slipping coquettishly off when they wish to make an impression on one of
the opposite sex. The Laosian women of the bush think no more of their
uncovered breasts than they do of their bare feet; these sophisticated
girls of the silken scarf in the capital recognize them as an asset.
There was something about their every gesture that recalled our own
flappers—with betel-nut taking the place of gum and of lip-stick. Yet
their coquetry may be largely innocent, for the French assured me, in
some cases rather regretfully, I thought, that in Laos there are few of
the _congaïe_ facilities so common in Annam.
The king’s wives, and the girls of the royal family and of the wealthier
class, wear a kind of swimming-vest, usually white, in addition to the
brilliant scarf. Perhaps his Majesty does not wish charms meant for his
own eyes alone to become even visually common property. Yet the royal
wives themselves on the way to market had about them a hint of coquetry,
even toward a foreigner, which seemed to be totally lacking among their
sisters of the bush. Many of the girls of Luang Prabang wear enormous
silver or pewter anklets, some of them weighing twenty piastres or more.
Others wore chains of ten-cent pieces. So many French silver piastres
have been turned into these anklets, bracelets, the metal collars of the
Miao, and other forms of adornment that it is little wonder Indo-China
now uses almost exclusively paper money.
Luang Prabang means Kingdom of the Divine Buddha. What more natural then
than that there should be many Buddhist temples, shrines, and
monasteries in its capital? Indeed there are so many on both sides of
the river that the town might easily be mistaken for a holy city,
devoted to priests and pilgrims. Some of the temple compounds are bare
ground scattered with yellow-roofed buildings of Siamese or Burmese
character, with big stupas made of mud bricks and more or less overgrown
with vegetation, with mere cells raised on piles, in which languid
bonzes meditate. Others are covered with groves of trees, shaded by
masses of palm and banana leaves; but in them all great calm and quiet
reigns. Just behind the main and market street fronting the royal palace
is a rocky ridge called Pagoda Hill, two hundred feet above the plain
and half encircled by the Nam-khan by which travelers unworthy of Fords
come to the capital from the east or south. It is worth climbing if only
for the view it offers of the idyllic city and its surrounding
semi-jungle; and along it ramble queer old religious structures,
including one built over a gigantic “footprint of Buddha” in the native
rock. What feet that far-famed son of India had, and what seven-league
boots, to have scattered, so long before the coming of railways and
Fords, his bare footprints so far and wide over the Orient!
Some of the old priests of Luang Prabang are honored as demigods by the
people of the kingdom. They step forth from their holy dwellings only
with a ceremonial parasol held over them, by one of the surrounding
group of youngster attendants in the same bright yellow; and the French
_commissaire_ himself was almost servile in the respectful politeness
with which he treated the most holy of them all, whose attitude
sometimes suggested that it was he who had the upper hand. These bonzes
may not even kill a flea, though the provocation must often be almost
too strong to be borne; but they may eat beef and the flesh of other
animals killed by some one else. Even the cynical French residents say
they are real celibates, that they would be expelled from the order if
they were caught breaking this particular vow. It might be harder to
keep were not all young men expected to be priests for a year or two, as
those of European lands become soldiers, only the ones to whom the
monastic life appeals retaining the yellow robe, which the great
majority soon discard for marriage. Little less sacred than the priests
are the dogs that all but overrun the capital, eating the food laid out
for gods and bonzes, much as the sacred oxen of India take their toll
from pious shopkeepers. Held in a kind of Buddhist reverence by the
people and more or less protected by the priests, these mongrels are not
even subjected to muzzle or license, though the French would like to
improve their rules of sanitation to the extent of exterminating the
harmless but self-confident curs.
But the French do not insist on imposing their religious beliefs on
their wards and colonies. In Luang Prabang they go so far as to provide
for the up-keep of the temples and monasteries in the annual
governmental budget. In a way this is a means of supporting the
educational system, for the priests act as schoolmasters to their
novices. In great contrast to China, there is not a single Christian
missionary in all the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha, not even a Catholic
priest. There was almost a sense of relief in finally getting completely
beyond the reach of missions, however good an opinion one may form of
mission work in some of its phases. For in certain moods one feels a
species of boastfulness in our insistence that so alien a race give up
its own beliefs in favor of our more or less generally accepted guess as
to the after-world and how to reach it, in our Western efforts to impose
our philosophy of life upon a people that has a not unworthy one of its
own, and one that seems to make them much happier than we are.
I had come to Luang Prabang, however, on the special invitation of its
king, and my chief duty and pleasure was to pay him my respects.
Ignorance is ever embarrassing, so the natural prelude to such an honor
as a royal audience was to find out something concerning the king and
his kingdom, as one skims through the chapter-headings of an author one
is about to meet. That ancient land is hardly known even to our
encyclopedias, to say nothing of our school-books, but a few basic facts
were available in the jungle-framed French offices of the capital,
offices strangely similar in their atmosphere of _paperasses_ and
official dignity to those French staff headquarters I had served in
during the war. Languid as it is, Luang Prabang’s history is not without
its exciting moments. For its origin one must go back to that great
Nan-chao kingdom, with its capital at Tali-fu in the southwestern corner
of China, founded in 629 A.D. and destroyed six centuries later (1234),
not by the Chinese but by their Mongol ruler, Kublai Khan. The Kingdom
of the Divine Buddha is one of the remnant kingdoms of the great Tai
race which, once holding a part of what is now China, was gradually
driven west and south, losing or attaining culture until it varied from
the high civilization of the Khmer to almost illiterate tribes,
according to where its new lot was cast. Best known to the outside world
by the Siamese word for man (_lao_), or as _shan_, from a Chinese word
used in Burma, this people still prefers to be called Tai.
Laos has eight divisions, of which Luang Prabang is the largest and the
only one still boasting a king of its own. A century ago most of it
belonged to ethnologically related Siam. I have already mentioned that
this greatest division of French Indo-China, about as large and of much
the same shape as Italy, has fewer inhabitants than Detroit. This is
largely because it was so often sacked, and its people killed by the
Chinese, who wanted the land, or carried off by the Siamese to populate
her sparsely settled regions along the Menam. A traveler who visited
Luang Prabang in 1872 found it the most compactly built city of Siam,
with the single exception of Bangkok, which it in some respects
resembled. But of several disasters the greatest seems to have been in
1887, when the Black Flags of Taiping days in China burned and almost
completely destroyed and depopulated it, so that perhaps it is not by
choice of its up-and-coming citizens that it is so roomy, pastoral, and
ideal a city to-day.
The same altruism and love of their fellow-man that has given the French
the arduous task of protecting the rest of Indo-China led to their
present position in the affairs of Laos. About the time the Chinese from
Yünnan were pillaging Luang Prabang kingdom a Frenchman named Pavie was
sent there on a mission. The father of the present king, born _Tiao_
Kham Souk, who lived from 1837 until 1904 and reigned under the name of
Ritthithamaronjsac—though he was more popularly known as King Zacharine,
and probably not entirely on account of his sweet disposition—was an
absolute despot, descended from a long direct line of similar rulers.
For the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha has been a kingdom as far back as
the memory of its people goes. Zacharine became a great friend of Pavie,
at least according to such data as was available in the French
government offices of Luang Prabang, and when the Siamese failed to
protect him, as they had promised, against the Chinese, he went to Siam
under Pavie’s wing; and later, in a quarrel with the Siamese, who had
burned and looted and carried off most of the people of Vientiane and
Xieng Khuang, he made the mistake, like his royal neighbors of Annam and
Cambodia, of calling in the French. By 1893 Siam had been compelled to
give up all claim to this ancient kingdom and to the magnificent
highlands of Tran-ninh, and all Laos became a European dependency under
the protection of France.
My host the _commissaire_ chose a victoria for our descent upon his
royal ward, no doubt feeling that to have used his Ford would be to call
unnecessary attention to himself as the only possessor, besides his
Majesty, of so regal a conveyance. Besides, the leisurely open carriage
was far more in keeping with the calm and woodsy atmosphere of the
metropolis of Laos. The king’s palace is a building mainly in French
style, more like a hotel with a steeple-cupola than the abode of an
Oriental potentate. It stands in a fairly spacious yard, not quite large
enough to be worthy the name of park, on the eastern bank of the Mekong,
at the foot of the hill graced by Buddha’s footprint; and it was
somewhat in disorder. Chairs were kicking about the foreign-style
dining-room, and there were other suggestions of a late party and
oversleeping servants. The building was quite new, it seemed; there were
few decorations on the walls yet, though a man had come all the way from
Paris to cover them with paintings. Evidently he had found the climate
not conducive to constant work, particularly work paid for by the day by
a protected people; for surely he could not have discovered a means of
squandering his time in the social amenities of the king’s harem, and
there was no other means of accounting for his Oriental leisureliness of
execution.
Royal servants went to announce us, though word of our coming had been
sent ahead, and while we waited I mentally reviewed the information I
had gleaned from the Oriental Almanach de Gotha it had been my privilege
to consult at French headquarters on the eve of my royal reception. I
make no claim as to its exactness, and still less to that of my memory;
but there is a probability that both of them are approximately correct.
_Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah, present king of Luang Prabang and a
direct descendant of an endless line of its kings, was born in 1885, on
July 14—no wonder he is a favorite of the French—and succeeded his
father Zacharine in 1904. His mother was not his mother, so to speak.
For _Tiao_ Thong Di, first wife of Zacharine, still known as the Queen
Mother, and real ruler of the royal household, bossing even the king
himself in domestic matters, according to reliable verbal information
from a French and feminine source, had no male children. The second-rank
wife, _Tiao_ Thong Si, daughter of a high mandarin related to the royal
family, gave birth to the present monarch; but in Laos as in China every
child is officially the offspring of the first wife. His father
Zacharine seems to have been a temperate person, considering his
advantages, for the king has only three half-brothers and six
half-sisters; though it is possible that Zacharine died with certain
secrets buried in his bosom, Occidental fashion. Half-sisters and
half-brothers may marry in Luang Prabang, by the way, which is not
without its effect on the reigning house. Also _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong
Somdet Prah has at least this much in common with his English colleague,
that he had an older brother who died, leaving him unexpectedly heir to
the throne.
The latest calculations were that the present king had fifteen wives and
about forty children; on this second point he did not seem to be very
exact himself, no doubt finding it difficult to keep strictly up to date
in domestic events within his household. Yet he did not look either worn
or dissipated, when presently he came in to shake hands and sit down
with us, perhaps because the Queen Mother takes so many of the palace
cares off his shoulders. Seven of his sons were studying at the _Lycée_
in Hanoï; and the crown prince, Savang Vathama, then sixteen, was
nearing his bachelor degree in a similar institution at Montpellier in
France, with the avowed intention of studying law afterward. The king
himself had a purely Laosian education under Buddhist priests until King
Zacharine sent him to a French _collège_ at Saïgon. Later he went to the
Ecole Coloniale in the Rue de l’Observatoire in Paris, where French
youths prepare for a career in the colonies. He came home once when his
father was ill, but upon his recovery was sent back to France to get
together a printing establishment with Laosian characters and to learn
how to run it, which makes him more or less related to the late kaiser,
bookbinder.
The king was plump and pleasant, handsome for his race, by no means
betraying his all but forty years. It was easy to imagine the girls of
Luang Prabang, if not indeed of France, “just crazy” about him, quite
aside from his royal rank. He had a frail Oriental mustache and that
beautiful bronze-brown complexion of his race. Unlike most European
monarchs he is purely of the blood of those he reigns over. But his
Majesty indulges in the chief minor vice of his people, and the only
blot on his manly beauty, and not even that of course to the fair ones
of his own land, was that his teeth, though they were not enameled, were
discolored and his lips somewhat bloody with betel-juice. Even now he
seemed to be nursing a quid, though with a regal finesse that it would
have done our secret chewers of tobacco good to see.
[Illustration: Wind-sieved rice is the principal food of the rural
inhabitants of Luang Prabang]
[Illustration: With a silk scarf worn loosely over a shoulder the women
of Luang Prabang capital are more coquettish than their waistless
sisters of the country districts]
[Illustration: The palace of the king of Luang Prabang sits placidly on
the bank of the upper Mekong]
[Illustration: The king turned out his chief dancing-girls and masked
male entertainers for my approval]
He wore a white cork helmet, a black bow-tie about a standing white
collar on a stiff white shirt with the round cuffs of a decade or more
ago, and a snow-white three-button coat which, in so far as my meager
knowledge in sartorial matters is trustworthy, was of the latest model.
The fact that the middle buttonhole was attached to the upper button may
have meant either a dreadful ignorance of Western ways or merely
unseemly haste in leaving his harem; or it may have had no significance
whatever. His feet were quite properly incased in low black shoes of
faultless last and luster, but—let the spinster reader blushingly turn
the page here—he wore no trousers! His rank and calling, it seems,
forbade him these final touches to an otherwise perfectly European
costume. Instead, his thighs were inclosed in the _pha_ or _sampot_,
such as is worn by both sexes in Siam and adjoining countries under
Siamese influence. It was a kind of short skirt, evidently of silk and
of colors verging on the gaudy, drawn between the legs and tucked into
the belt at the back, reaching to just below the knees in front and
“rather less than ‘arf o’ that be’ind.” Naturally a full-fledged king
could not leave the hiatus uncovered and keep his self-respect.
Therefore between _sampot_ and shoes the royal legs were clad in silk
stockings of which the most regal young lady of our own land might have
been proud—except that in her case they would no doubt have been of a
color to deceive the uninformed observer into thinking she wore no
stockings whatever, whereas in backward barbarian Luang Prabang this
would have been bad form. These were jet-black and reached so far up the
back as to suggest that they were held by a band about the waist.
Indeed, it was immediately evident that the king had missed a splendid
chance for extra decoration by not wearing a pair of red garters just
below the knees.
A goodly proportion of the royal income must be spent on stockings. For
I was assured, not merely by common rumor but by all the Frenchwomen in
Luang Prabang—of whom there are three or four—that his Majesty will
under no circumstances wear anything but silk about his shapely legs,
and that a stocking with the slightest hole in it is immediately
discarded. It would be easy to imagine his wives, of whom he fortunately
has fifteen, scrambling for these discards of the royal wardrobe, and
racing for their darning needles, were it not that in Laos even the
wives of kings do not wear stockings.
But do not for a moment gather from all this that _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong
Somdet Prah had the slightest hint of the barbarian in his appearance.
Except for the sacred _sampot_ in place of trousers, and the proof of a
king’s income between that and the shoes, his Majesty would have
attracted no attention whatever in a Palm Beach crowd, unless it were by
his athletic build and his agreeable undissipated smile, and, at close
range, the light touch as of fresh blood on his lips beneath the thin
well clipped mustache. In fact of all the kings with whom I have
hobnobbed he was the most pleasing to look upon, and to all outward
appearances a gentleman not even given to bullying his wives. His lapel
was adorned with the little red button of a French decoration—the Legion
of Honor, I fancy, though I confess to a deplorable ignorance of these
important matters—and a gold watch-chain hanging from this drew
attention to what was evidently not the thinnest of watches in the
outside breast-pocket. A signet-ring not unlike those of our West Point
and Annapolis graduates encircled his wedding finger, and he wore a cord
of what looked like ordinary string about each wrist.
This cord decoration is something peculiar to Luang Prabang. The
_commissaire_ wore them also, as did his baby son; possibly his charming
lady did too, though I am not sure that mere women are worthy of them.
Cords are put about the wrists amid elaborate ceremonies and must be
worn for at least seven days if they are to be effective in preserving
the wearer from evil. The king himself had come to tie those about the
wrists of the _commissaire’s_ newly born son and heir and thereby assure
it constant good luck through all the menaces to health among European
infants living in the tropics. The French are good colonists partly
because of their wisdom in keeping up and even taking part in such
simple and harmless native customs, which the average American and
British colonial official would probably scorn as “poppycock,” if he did
not actually try to uproot them. “Poppycock” it is, to be sure, but the
effect which a little sympathy in such matters has on native populations
is not.
The king spoke a fair but throaty French, but was not exactly talkative
in that tongue, whatever he may be in his own and in the intimacies of
his harem. In fact, contrary as it may be to our movie and popular-novel
conception of royalty, he was rather bashful, with a school-boy dread of
making a mistake in the foreign tongue he was using, and at the same
time evidently fearful of doing or saying anything that might displease
the French. His demeanor was a curious mixture of regal old-family
pride, a pride reaching so far back that we mere moderns from a
barbarian world were not worthy of knowing the secrets of life behind
it, and of the anxiety of the star in a royal movie being filmed under
the eye of the manager of the great Jewish corporation that is “putting
him across.” All of which did not remove the first impression that
_Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah would be a fine fellow to take along
for a tramp or a swim, and that it would not be long before one could
begin calling him “Prah Old Top.”
All hands seemed a little ill at ease. Having exchanged the usual
platitudes, we stood about doing nothing much, paused with admiring mien
before a new bronze bust of the king, covered with medals and
decorations, and a good likeness, though of no better color than his
actual complexion, but showing neither the betel-red lips nor the
cigarette that drips almost incessantly from them. His Majesty handed
out atrocious French tobacco-monopoly cigars worthy of a Chinese
_tuchun_, but wisely stuck to cigarettes himself, smoking one after
another in rapid succession. We chatted a little on general subjects,
the impression growing that the king’s French was good enough if only he
could have thrown off the feeling that it would be an intolerable
disgrace for a king to make an error in speech. Can it be this that
makes modern monarchs and presidents so taciturn? Among the thoughts
that passed between us I gathered that he wished to visit the emperor of
Annam when Khai-dinh celebrated his birthday the following year. I have
never heard whether he was able to do so, but if he and his
fellow-protégé, whom he so far had never met, were allowed to get
together out of hearing of the French they must have had a great
chat—provided of course that they had a language in common.
At a mere suggestion from my companion, and as if it were a relief from
a tense situation, his Majesty graciously stepped to the main doorway of
the palace, an excellent jet-black background for a blazing tropical
sunshine that outdid anything Hollywood can devise in lighting-effects,
and posed for his photograph. Another merest hint from the _commissaire_
and _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah went off at once like a small boy
to dress up for his picture, and came back in a surprisingly short time
in his most regal robes, a radiant royal costume quite beyond my power
to describe. All the medals on the breast of bronze near-by were now in
place on the living model; he was again in women’s silk stockings, quite
evidently brand new, and this time held up by round-the-leg garters of
brilliant hue. A green and saffron flowered-silk _sampot_—but how
foolish for a man who cannot even describe a ball-dress well enough to
give his wife any conception of it to attempt so impossible a job as
this!
Never have I found a king more docile in meeting my every suggestion.
Barely a whisper from me and he ordered his throne-room decked out in
its coronation best, had his royal attendants summoned. Cringing
flunkies brought in swords of state, big golden bowls, a marvelous hat
of half cowboy half women-of-the-plume-days style, studded with jewels,
and with a Burmese-pagoda top. Ascending his throne, the king assumed
his most regal aspect, his white gloves flashing like those of a traffic
policeman during a Catholic procession. The master of ceremonies of the
palace himself brought tables and other regal paraphernalia to offset my
lack of a tripod; two men in green, each holding a great sword, knelt
fearfully at the foot of the throne, and—and I muffed the picture. No
doubt the nervous tension of photographing kings on their thrones in
their coronation-robes would be enough to cause an even calmer and more
experienced photographer to misjudge tropical light conditions; at any
rate I so under-exposed that strip of film that only those with keen
eyesight can make out more than the general lay-out of the throne, and
the king’s white-gloved hands on his richly sampotted knees.
Lesser catastrophes have left broken hearts, but it did not so much
matter about that throne-room picture after all, for, again at the
merest suggestion of the _commissaire_ and as promptly as a circus seal
obeys its trainer, the king once more stepped to the spotlighted doorway
of the palace, hat, robes, medals, and all, to give my camera another
trial, finally posing with his French boss at his side. The
_commissaire_ was also in all his glory. Three great medals that proved
he had done this, that, or some other brave deed—for he was not a man to
have successfully bootlicked this, that, or the other high
authority—blazed over his heart. His white uniform coat and black
trousers had fancy neck, waist, wrist, and trouser-seam bands; he wore a
sword, with rich belt-tassels, and carried white gloves, though the
white _casque_ on his head and the black shoes on the blistering
pavement had nothing unusual about them. In short his dress was as out
of keeping with his plebeian name of Mill—were names translated—as it
was with the simple backwoods life about us. Finally his Majesty, of his
own volition unless my eyes were momentarily off their guard, was
graciously moved to insist that I also stand beside him in the doorway
spotlight and let the camera again do its worst. In vain did I plead my
unworthiness to be thus immortalized, like one of the boon companions of
his Majesty, particularly in my vagabondish incongruities of rumpled
semi-whites, once-tan shoes still half decided to be black, a necktie
that insisted on the right to be temperamental in a tropical climate, a
pocket bulging full of—how should I know what? The king, I long
afterward noticed, wore quite a different face in these pictures in true
royal garb than that of the genial boulevardier he presented in mufti,
something like his own elder brother, with all the cares of state upon
his shoulders.
But all this was only the beginning of the honors that were heaped upon
me before that epoch-making day was done! Immediately after the signal
distinction of being photographed by the resplendent _commissaire_ at
the side of the even more luminiferous king I was knocked breathless—or
at least I might have been if the _commissaire_ had not that morning
whispered to me the possibility of what was to happen next, probably
before the king himself had thought of it; in fact there had been subtle
hints to that effect as far back as Xieng Khuang, if not in Hanoï
itself—by the announcement that his Majesty was about to confer upon me
his most regal decoration, the most prominent of the many medals on the
breasts of the _commissaire_ and of the king himself, both in bronze and
in the flesh, the highest honor of which this protected Oriental
potentate is capable, something corresponding in Luang Prabang to the
order of the Rising Sun in Japan, to wit: the order of the Million
Elephants and the White Parasol! For you must know that Luang Prabang is
not only the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha but even more officially the
Kingdom of the Million Elephants and the White Parasol, just as King
Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah’s real title is Master of Heaven and of Life.
I do not know whether it is actually claimed that there are so many
pachyderms in the kingdom at the same time, but a little exaggeration is
always admissible in the tropics; or it may be that the souls of
departed elephants are also included in the reckoning.
The king announced his magnificent intention by a little speech in
French, with a manner strangely like that of a school-boy sentenced to
make the class presentation speech to a favorite teacher, and from it I
gathered that I was to be decorated because I was the only American—and
the word he used made it mean of either North or South America—who had
ever done his humble capital the honor of visiting it. The only one of
whom there is any official record, no doubt he meant, if indeed he was
not indulging in a bit of royal spoofing; for it is known by many, if
not by the king himself, that at least one Protestant missionary once
came through the kingdom on a scouting expedition, and the chances are
that he was American. But naturally he had not announced himself to the
constituted authorities of a country that does not allow Christian
mission work, and it may be that he did not enter the capital.
I had hitherto always been under the delusion that the bestowal of an
order meant the pinning on of the corresponding medal by the bestower’s
own fair or sunburned hands, and with war days in France in mind I knew
not what moment I might get a betel-juicy royal kiss on either cheek.
But this dreadful misgiving was but another evidence of my appalling
ignorance. On the contrary, to be decorated evidently meant merely being
given permission to decorate myself. It is true that there was handed me
later in the day an engraved diploma, in Siamese and French, bearing
here and there three elephant-heads surmounted by a white parasol, and
with my name written on the dotted line by a master penman who certainly
had not learned his calling in a Buddhist-monk school. It was neatly
rolled inside a section of bamboo to protect it from the rainy season
that was almost certain to break upon me before I reached modern forms
of transportation again. In fact I am not sure that the king did not
personally bring me this diploma, though I do know that it was prepared
in the French-staff-like government offices far from the royal palace.
But the medal itself, the visible public proof that I have been honored
beyond any of my fellow-countrymen, any of my fellow-hemispherites for
that matter, I should have to spend many francs for in a
department-store at Hanoï, if ever I reached there again. Being as
Scotch of disposition as I am abhorrent of the red tape incident to
making a purchase in a French department-store, I should certainly never
have squandered that hard-earned money, even with the franc at one of
its lowest ebbs, had not the family tyrant absolutely insisted, refusing
even to discuss the matter. She won of course, and the gaudy
elephantine-parasol trinket and the ribbon in Spanish colors that goes
with it has been tucked away somewhere among my rarely-unpacked
belongings ever since. Ah, those happy bachelor days when a man could do
exactly as his whims or his conscience prompted!
I might wear that medal now, or at least the modest lapel-ribbon that
stands for it, if I did not realize the injustice that would be to those
of my veteran friends who, having risked their eyesight and digestion at
Paris and Chaumont over maps of the western front, are entitled to
display similar adornments to an envious, disappointed world, or if I
were not fearful of being mistaken for a visiting Elk or Moose or some
other fraternal wild animal and dragged into the gilded cages provided
for those creatures. My resentment at being forced after all to decorate
myself, by way of the pocketbook, has subsided, for it seems the same
rule is true of Phi Beta Kappa pins and class numerals; but I shall
never entirely forgive Luang Prabang for bringing me as near as I ever
expect to come to the divorce courts. For when everything was over, and
I had broken the great news to my son at Hanoï in the telegrams we
exchanged on that most auspicious occasion, which chanced also to be his
fourth birthday, I discovered to my domestic dismay and perpetual regret
that the order of the Million Elephants and the White Parasol is also
conferred upon women—at least of France and allied countries—and that if
the king had suspected that I had a wife—queer I did not show it after
nearly five years of married life!—he would have—but what is the use of
bewailing what is past and done with and irreparable?
The decoration speech over, the king ordered out his dancing-girls,
deathly pale with hastily floured faces, and his male entertainers, in
masks meant to be terrifying, the gaudy colors of their festive garments
contrasting with the scarcity of soap discernible through the crevices
of their costumes. They posed rather fearfully. Some of the girls were
as young as ten, I am sure, and certainly none of them were over twenty,
for the king has a Broadway taste in these matters. Dancing-girls and
masked male figures alike wore an elaborate head-dress in the form of a
pagoda—the Rangoon style of pagoda, not those of China—which suggested a
close cultural relationship between Luang Prabang and Cambodia. As to
the welter of colors that flashed forth from them in the blazing
tropical sunshine I shall not even attempt to say anything; just let the
bootlegged imagination run riot, so long as you do not forget the
reddish teeth and the swollen lips driveling with betel-nut that gave
them the look of ghouls that had just eaten a warm corpse, or of
harmless childish-faced trolls that had been caught in the act of
gorging themselves with currant jelly in the royal jam closet.
Neither the dancers nor their king gave any sign that I had outstayed my
welcome; nor was I expected to back away from his Majesty when at last I
voluntarily took my leave. But I have a suspicion that there was more
frankness in the attitude of the baby elephant that was cavorting about
the royal lawn in the wake of its chained and mahout-ridden mother. For
when I tried to coax it into a proper filial position for a photograph
the little beast set out after me in a manner entirely out of keeping
with its status as the property of a tame king. So graphically could I
still describe this experience when I reached Hanoï again that to this
day my son regards the time when the elephant “switched its trunk” about
me as the height of my intrepid career.
The king of Luang Prabang keeps a number of royal elephants; and he is
no nonentity as a business man either, by the way. Supplementing his
salary, if the word suits a monarch, of forty-six thousand piastres a
year, and thereby offsetting his consumption of silk stockings, he has
much private property, including great forests and sawmills, in which
many of his elephants work for him. For a time some of the royal
elephants were assigned the task of dragging rollers used in the making
of roads about the capital; but they are a tender beast, for all their
size and reputed longevity, and even with only four or five hours of
labor a day, at their two-mile-an-hour gait, with the privilege of
resting every third day, two of them died from this unwonted exertion.
The king, evidently no figurehead in his capacity as business manager of
his personal estates and property, protested, and from four to six
water-buffaloes to each roller now take the place of an elephant.
In theory the many wild elephants in the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha
also belong to the king. When new recruits are needed in the royal
stables, some of the wild beasts are caught by digging pits. Then a tame
and a wild one are chained together, leaving the wild elephant to tug
furiously at a collar with sharp iron points in it. The most bellicose
are fastened to a tree by a lasso about a hind leg until they are worn
out with struggle and hunger, when the two largest _éléphants de chasse_
available take the captive between them and shake and roll him until he
decides, like the man who foresees the lawyer fees involved in an action
for divorce, that after all he will be happier in the domestic state.
Most of those captured do not wait for this third degree, but, suddenly
resigned to their new fate, give in to the barbed collar and stroll
homeward with their false brother, pulling up tufts of good grass as
they go and calmly tapping each mouthful on a front foot to shake the
earth off the roots before transferring it to their dainty mouths.
Whatever the baby elephant may have meant by accelerating my exit from
the palace grounds, the king himself evidently had no intention of
dismissing me so cavalierly. For within an hour of our arrival home,
that is, at the rambling one-story soft-brick house of the
_commissaire_, with its crowing roosters—if I could rule a king I should
at least banish roosters from the back yard on which the windows of my
honored guests opened—his Majesty came alone in his Ford to return my
call and stay to lunch. He had changed back into civilian garb—not the
same garments of course in which he had first received me—perfectly
European again except for another gay silk _sampot_ and black silk
stockings out of a newly opened box. Were kings relieved of the task of
dressing and undressing, what duties would there be left for most of
them anyway? He was received like any other invited luncheon guest,
though he was always addressed as _Majesté_ by the _commissaire_ and his
well chosen wife, and the half-dozen French functionaries they had been
able to scrape together in the kingdom. In lieu of a box of chocolates
his Majesty had sent ahead some Laosian food that is served as dessert
at the royal table. One dish was a kind of custard cooked in small
cocoanuts, the base of the husk cut down to resemble the shank of a
goblet, and preserving the cocoanut taste. Another was a kind of
vermicelli covered with nut dust, not unlike a similar dish in China.
The ordinary people do not indulge in such delicacies, which are
reserved for the royal palace. Even there, according to my hostess,
there are few changes of menu. The king was well versed in Western table
manners, though he did not take a very active part in the conversation,
which of course was in French. He showed up best as a sympathetic
listener, and was easily amused. In so far as my own almost unknown
country was concerned, he seemed to be particularly interested in the
Mormons and in what the French call the _régime sec_. He laughed for
some time in his merry yet kingly way when told that Brigham Young had
forty wives and a corresponding number of children, apparently without
seeing any connection between this and his own fifteen and forty
respectively. Or it may be that he was laughing at the plight of Brigham
from the vantage-point of his own experience. The _régime sec_, in other
words, prohibition, he plainly did not understand at all, any more than
does the average Frenchman, and there was nothing to be gained in trying
to make clear the American point of view on the subject. He would of
course have been horrified to learn that there are persons in that
benighted wineless land from which I came who have never heard of his
ancient kingdom; nor did I feel it quite safe to pad out the
conversation by bringing up the question of silk stockings in its
relation to our national economic problem, for one can never be sure
just how sensitive kings may be on these very personal matters.
It became more and more evident, however, that _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong
Somdet Prah was not born anybody’s fool, even if circumstances and the
foolishness of his father Zacharine had left him and his kingdom in an
embarrassing position. There was something behind his Oriental-Gallic
courtesy and his almost perpetual smile. Nor did he seem to take himself
or his regality or his white elephants or any of the rest of his royal
trappings too seriously. On this subject of white elephants, by the way,
he mentioned that one was now supposed to be on its way to him, some
Laosian merchants among his loyal subjects having captured or purchased
such an animal that had been seen in a distant part of his kingdom. He
thought Bangkok used to have one but that his Siamese peer was now
forced to do without this adornment to their respective kinghoods. They
were not white anyway, he went on, but rather a pinkish light-gray, like
the albino water-buffalo; and his manner implied that whatever his royal
cousin of Siam might think about it, a white elephant to him would be
merely an interesting addition to his menagerie. “May you live as long
as an elephant!” is a common form of greeting in some parts of the East;
but quite aside from the doubtful kindness involved, it is based on one
of those many mistaken beliefs of mankind, according to the king,
corroborated by all the French present, who asserted that no elephant
ever lives longer than have many men and women. As monarch of what may
be the most elephant-infested corner of the globe he should be a
credible witness on the subject.
All through the luncheon the punka over our heads had moved in fitful
spurts, for the coolie squatting on the cool _dalles_ of the veranda
outside fell asleep even in the presence of royalty. His Majesty was as
hard to get rid of as an awkward country cousin, and the hostess grew
visibly fidgety before he finally remounted his Ford, for her other
guests included the doctor who should long since have been back at the
government hospital, and other functionaries eager to take up their
protective duties again, yet who could not of course show any desire to
leave so long as their monarch and master remained. One somehow had the
feeling that a king would wish to get back to his affairs of state, or
at least to his harem, as soon as possible, but this one gave evidence
of so greatly enjoying his luncheon party that he seemed capable of
sitting there forever listening and smiling.
There are really four kings in the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha, or were
until one of them recently died. None of them are to be replaced,
however, as they pass on toward Nirvana, except this real one with the
title of _Majesté_. The others are merely _Excellences_. Twice a year
all the chiefs of Luang Prabang, which is a province of Laos as well as
a kingdom, come to the capital for a conference under the French
_commissaire_. It is a leisurely conference, one fancies, for the people
of Luang Prabang, high or low, do not include the word “hurry” in their
active vocabulary. Not long before, the king had gone to Hanoï, whether
for praise or a scolding no one but the governor-general seemed to know.
Nine of his suite missed the return train to Vinh, and one old mandarin
wept like a child because he could not believe that anything,
six-o’clock trains particularly, started at the very moment these
strange white people said it would. He had been barely half an hour
late, yet the conveyance had left without him! From Vinh, by the way,
all but the most important members of the party had to walk home with
the coolies, while the king proceeded by automobile over the route by
which I had come. Even the prince who had been sent to meet me at
Muongyu had made this long tramp. Evidently the position of prince has
its drawbacks in an ostensibly absolute Oriental monarchy—for that Luang
Prabang still purports to be, with the French merely advisers to the
hereditary despot. You may marry a king’s daughter, but that does not
mean that you may ride in the king’s Ford. But the travelers by
automobile gained nothing in time, for the whole outfit had to wait a
couple of weeks at Xieng Khuang until the baggage caught up with it,
while the undressed monarch remained officially incognito until his
trunks arrived. On another occasion a French aviator took him to his
forest-girdled capital in a single day.
There are ceremonial occasions when the king comes to the home of the
_commissaire_, not by Ford but on an elephant, and is carried up the
steps seated on his throne, white parasols over him and a great retinue
about him. The French residents condoled with me particularly because I
had not reached Luang Prabang _quinze jours_—a fortnight—earlier. For in
the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha New Year’s had fallen on April 12 that
year, and with it comes the ceremony of the _petit serment_, as
distinguished from the _grand serment_ in November; that is, the
swearing of fealty to the French and to the king—please note the order.
Then the king rides on several elephants, I gathered, though probably
only one at a time, and is carried through the town on his throne,
followed by long processions of notables and mandarins in white jackets
and _sampots_ of every color of the rainbow, if not indeed several which
it lacks. The common people, all the inhabitants of the capital except
the Annamese and the French, kneel and bow their heads to the earth, for
then they must not look upon their king, though it is said a few of the
least reverent sometimes do get a glimpse _à la dérobée_. To judge by
the pictures French residents had taken of the recent ceremony it was a
sight worth coming two weeks earlier to see. In them all the inevitable
cigarette was dangling from the king’s lips; no ceremony is so solemn,
no place so sacred, that _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah will go
without his smoke. As many a photograph of the few remaining European
monarchs and their possible successors shows, he has good precedent for
thus openly indulging. Perhaps it is a sign of increasing democracy; or
such informal and plebeian habits may always have been shared by kings,
though our expurgated histories do not mention them. Cigarette or Ford,
however, the people of Luang Prabang take their king very seriously,
more seriously than he does himself. The native doctor at the government
hospital, educated in Hanoï and outwardly entirely French except in
complexion, kneels and touches his forehead to the floor before he gives
medicine to one of the king’s sons in the palace nursery.
[Illustration: Knighted in the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha]
[Illustration: Two royal elephants saw me off from the palace, the
youngster showing a desire to make me depart on the run]
[Illustration: A Miao woman on her travels carries bed and food]