As the driving force behind Laos' move towards a market economy, its
capital city is emerging from years of seclusion and stagnation. Stephen
Mansfield witnesses Vientiane's revival

Buffeted by the whims of larger, more powerful nations and isolated from
the international community, Laos, at least until only a few years ago,
remained more rumour than reality. Its capital, Vientiane, an anomaly on
the world map. With the completion in 1994 of the Australian-funded
Mittaphab, or 'Friendship bridge', connecting Vientiane with neighbouring
Thailand, and the increasing economic interest in the development of the
lower Mekong basin, Vientiane's days of charming obscurity could well be
numbered.

To the French who colonised the country from 1893 to 1954, Vientiane was
little more than the administrative centre of what many of them considered
to be the back garden of their empire in Indochina, the capital of an
unprofitable colony run, in the words of one colonial officer, with 'benign
neglect'. If Laos ever resembled a kind of landlocked Tahiti to the French,
the Vietnam War brought an abrupt end to that. For more than 10 years, Laos
was a battleground for the US's not so secret war in Indochina. As the
conflict escalated, Vientiane soon became the centre for covert US
operations in the region. But with the communist Pathet Lao victory of
1975, Vientiane reverted to its former semianonymity. Between 1975 and
1990, the city's influential French and US contingent was replaced with
teams of Soviet advisers, aid workers and technicians. Most of these have
now returned home.

Three decades of colonial and civil wars have left Vientiane remarkably
intact. Most of the damage to its buildings has come more from neglect -- a
lack of funds and the seditious tropical climate -- than from warfare or
civil strife. Vientiane remains an urban time capsule, a minor but
intriguing mosaic of French, Chinese and Lao influences. Pavements are
broad, bedevilled with missing or lopsided flagstones, and tend to sprout
with banana fronds, weeds and sundry fauna. This backwater of old
Indochina, where few buildings rise to over two storeys, may appear to be
little more than a minor Mekong port town to the casual observer, but there
are clear signs of a re-awakening.

Buddhism has regained much of its former official approval and is again in
favour with the authorities. Until a few years ago, monks were persecuted,
but now the temples are again centres of activity and learning. Brightly
painted billboards proclaiming the achievements of the 'World Proletariat
Revolution' can still be seen along the streets of Vientiane and elsewhere,
but most Lao would agree that these sentiments are little more than token
anachronisms. The word 'prosperity' replaced 'socialism' in the national
motto in August 1991 at the same time that government cadres were
discreetly airbrushing the hammer and sickle from the national flag and
other official insignias. Under the government's 'New thinking' reform
program, the country is moving increasingly towards an open market economy
and the driving motor behind these changes is Vientiane.

The outward signs of this release of entrepreneurial energy are evident on
almost every street corner of the capital. Well-stocked shops and busy
street markets foment with activity well into the evening, and the
sprawling Morning Market (now renamed the New Supermarket), a covered
emporium of shop lots selling every conceivable type of consumer goods, is
well attended by Lao customers and the small groups of foreign tourists who
have just started to trickle into Vientiane. Once elegant French villas,
Chinese style shop-houses and offices, fronted with peeling stucco, boast
gleaming new business plaques. A large board along nearby Samsenthai Road
saying 'First Class Hotel and Shopping Centre' dwarfs the largely unvisited
Revolutionary Museum next door, a taunting reminder of the triumph of
capital in a city that still maintains a token use of socialist rhetoric.
Vientiane is not a city that burns bright with neon, but there is nothing,
with the exception of good taste, to stop it from being as dazzling as
Kowloon or Singapore; particularly given Laos' massive hydroelectric
potential, which has already earned the country the epithet 'the battery of
Southeast Asia'. Most of the electricity produced at the Nam Ngum Dam, 80
kilometres north of Vientiane, is now exported to Thailand, a country eager
to see the completion of a series of larger dams just a few kilometres
upstream from the capital.

As the political and commercial hub of the nation, all of the country's
ministries, overseas embassies and consulates are located in Vientiane, and
an increasing number of overseas development agencies, NGOs and larger
bodies like the UN have their headquarters here. Over a quarter of Laos'
GDP (double the nation's export earnings) comes from foreign aid, much of
which finances the import of essential foreign goods such as food, oil and
machinery. Without a significant manufacturing base of its own, Laos is
heavily dependent upon these funds, which is one of the highest per capita
aid flows in the developing world.

The most conspicuous change to come in recent years to this once sleepy
capital has been the completion of the Thai-Lao bridge across the Mekong
river. This 1,174- metre construction connects the northeastern Thai city
of Nong Khai with the Lao port of Tha Nalaeng, 16 kilometres southeast of
Vientiane. The bridge, the first of its kind to span the Mekong, boasts two
traffic lanes and a walkway, and there is provision for a central railway
track should Laos, the only country in Indochina without a railway system,
decide to build one. Although the bridge is destined to introduce great
changes, traffic flows have been restricted by Vientiane's reluctance to
move too fast, and there is an inability to agree with Bangkok on certain
key issues, such as the use of checkpoints insisted on by the Lao, and
which side of the road traffic should take. Thailand favours the left, Laos
the right. At the endearingly quaint instigation of the Lao, the bridge
closes every day before dark and on Sundays.

After years of seclusion and stagnation, the pace of change and economic
development evident in Vientiane is increasing, but not at a rate,
government officials are keen to stress, that will turn their capital into
a seminal Bangkok, or harm the Laotian way of life. The bridge, however, is
certain to be an enormous harbinger of change in the long run, and one that
is already putting Indochina's smallest and least altered capital back on
the map.

PHOTO (COLOR): Left: Wat That Luang is the most eminent temple in Laos.

MAP: Right: Landlocked Laos is emerging from obscurity

PHOTO (COLOR): Wat Phra Keo, home of this beautifully oxidised Buddah
statue, is an important temple museum

PHOTO (COLOR): Traffic is sparse in Vientiane

PHOTO (COLOR): That Dam, the black Stupa, is one of the city's oldest
monuments