Muang Khoun

Muang Khoun is thirty kilometres south of Phonsavan and another world entirely. The tuk-tuk ride takes forty minutes on a road that drops off the plateau and follows a river valley through small farming settlements, and when you arrive in what remains of the old capital, the first thing you notice is the quiet. Not the pleasant quiet of countryside but the specific quiet of a place that used to be much louder — a silence that has a shape, because the shape of what was here is still visible in the ruins.

Muang Khoun was the capital of the Kingdom of Xieng Khouang for centuries. The French colonial era left it with administrative buildings and a certain provincial dignity. Then the bombing started in the 1960s, intensifying through the early 1970s, and what had been a living city was reduced to rubble. The population fled into the surrounding hills. Some never came back. The current small town exists on the edge of the ruins — a few hundred people, a market, a school — and the ruins themselves remain as ruins, unrestored, the walls of French-era buildings open to the sky, the temple compounds returned to grass and scrub.

The main reason to come is Wat Phia Wat, which contains a Buddha so large it survived the bombing because there was simply no practical way to destroy it. The statue sits in the ruined shell of a temple that has been deliberately left unrestored — the roof gone, the walls crumbled to courses of brick, the floor returned to earth. The Buddha’s face, slightly water-stained, retains an expression of such complete serenity that standing in front of it becomes slightly embarrassing, the way it sometimes is to be observed being agitated by something small. Around the base of the statue, incense sticks burn in a sand urn and someone has left a plate of sticky rice wrapped in banana leaf. The offerings keep coming even when the temple is a skeleton.

There is also Wat Si Phum nearby, where a smaller chedi still stands, its brickwork showing the pockmarks of shrapnel. The colonial administrator’s house exists as four walls and a floor. A French-built school, now a ruin, has trees growing through its roof. The town feels like it is still deciding what to do with all of this — which may be why they haven’t done anything, which may be the right choice.

I had lunch in the small market — grilled chicken on bamboo skewers, sticky rice, a bag of cut mango with salt and chilli — and watched a group of children playing football in the dust near the ruined gate of what had been the main temple compound. They used a concrete bollard as one goalpost and a man’s sandal as the other. The ruins were scenery. The football was the point.

When to go: Muang Khoun can be visited year-round, but the dry season (November to April) makes the roads from Phonsavan much easier and the ruins more comfortable to explore. Hire a tuk-tuk from Phonsavan for the half-day — it is too far and the road too variable for cycling. Aim to arrive mid-morning before the heat peaks and allow two to three hours for the ruins and lunch.