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Laos
Index
The Kingdom of Louangphrabang became a protectorate and
was
initially placed under the governor general of Indochina
in Hanoi.
Pavie saw to the officialization in Hanoi of the titles of
King Oun
Kham, his eldest son who assumed the duties of king under
the name
Zakarine--also known as Kham Souk (r. 1894-1904)-- and the
viceroy,
Boun Khong.
The French originally divided central Laos into two
administrative districts. By April and May 1894, however,
the
initial organization was already being modified, and a new
plan was
put into effect a year later. In 1899 Upper Laos was
integrated
with Lower Laos under one administrator.
In 1904 and 1905, Laos was deprived of southern
plateaus that
were previously part of its territory
(see
fig. 2). Under
the
February 13, 1904, Convention Modifying the Treaty
Concluded on
October 3, 1893, Siam ceded to France control of the
right-bank
portion of Louangphrabang (present-day Xaignabouri
Province) and
part of the right-bank territory of Champasak. The French
governor
general, by a decree of March 28, 1905, fixed the border
between
Laos and Cambodia at the Tonle Repou River. Under the
March 23,
1907, Treaty Between France and Siam, the French
retroceded the
territory of Dan Sai, southwest of the "elbow" of the
Mekong, to
Siam.
The French thus reestablished a political entity in the
middle
Mekong Valley extending from China to the Khong falls on
the
Cambodian border that owed allegiance to neither Vietnam
nor Siam,
thereby eluding Vietnamese claims to Laos, whose
historical basis
they had verified in the archives in Hué. Detachment of
the
administration of the left-bank territories from Annam was
justified on grounds of budgetary necessity in the new
French
Indochina.
Data as of July 1994
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