Few places in the world combine as much mystery and as much recent history as the Plain of Jars. Spread across the hills of Xieng Khuang province, on the plateau of north-eastern Laos, thousands of huge stone urns (some three metres tall and weighing several tonnes) have dotted the landscape for about two thousand years, and nobody knows for sure who carved them or why. Declared a World Heritage Site in 2019, they are one of the most fascinating archaeological puzzles in Southeast Asia.
But visiting the Plain of Jars also means looking into one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century. Xieng Khuang was the heart of the 'secret war' the United States waged in Laos between 1964 and 1973, and it was so devastated by bombing that it became one of the hardest-hit areas in history. To this day the plateau lives with unexploded ordnance, which is why the jars are visited along carefully cleared paths. That double story, the ancient mystery and the recent wound, makes this destination unique.
This guide lays out the visit with the restraint the place deserves: how many days to spend, how to explore the jar sites safely, where to learn about the history of the war and UXO, how to get to Phonsavan and where to eat and sleep. The Plain of Jars isn't an easy postcard destination but a place to think, learn and show respect, where the most ancient and the most tragic sides of Laos meet on the same hills.
The stone jars of Xieng Khuang were carved about 2.000 years ago, in the Iron Age, by a culture we know very little about. The most widely accepted theory links them to funerary practices: cremated human remains and objects have been found near the jars, and it's believed they were used to let the dead decompose before burial, perhaps for elites who controlled the salt and metal trade routes. For centuries the region was a Tai principality (muang), the kingdom of Xieng Khuang, a tributary of Lan Xang and later fought over by Laos, Vietnam and Siam. Its modern history was branded by the 'secret war' of 1964-1973, when it was one of the most heavily bombed provinces in the world: its old capital was flattened and its people lived underground. Today the archaeological mystery, the memory of the war and the slow work of clearing ordnance exist side by side. Its full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historical and spiritual heart of Laos: Luang Prabang, the old royal capital of Lan Xang and a World Heritage Site, set among karst mountains, the Nam Ou river and the enigmatic Plain of Jars, one of Asia's great archaeological mysteries.
Read the history of North (mountains and rivers) →They depart from Luang Prabang, 118 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Scattered across the hills of the Xieng Khuang plateau, in north-eastern Laos, thousands of giant stone jars have defied any simple explanation for two millennia. They come in every size, from just over a metre to three metres tall, and some weigh several tonnes. They are carved from sandstone, granite or limestone; some have a smooth rim, while others have a lip for a lid that has mostly been lost. They are grouped in dozens of sites (more than ninety have been catalogued) spread across a landscape of green hills. And nobody knows for certain who made them, how, or exactly what for.
Archaeological studies date them to the Iron Age, roughly 2,000 to 2,500 years ago. The pioneering research was carried out in the 1930s by the French archaeologist Madeleine Colani, whose work is still a key reference. The theory with the most support today is the funerary one. Cremated human remains, bones, teeth and grave goods (beads, tools, pottery) have been found near the jars, which suggests the urns were part of complex death rituals. One hypothesis holds that bodies were first placed in the jars for 'defleshing', an initial decomposition, and that the remains were then buried.
The mystery deepens with the unanswered questions. Where did the stone come from, and how were urns weighing several tonnes hauled to the tops of the hills? Who was the society capable of such an undertaking? Local legend is far more colourful. It says the jars were actually giant cups made by a race of giants, or by a mythical king called Khun Cheung, to celebrate a great military victory with lao-lao (rice spirit). Science and legend meet on these silent hills.
Why here, on this remote plateau, did the jar culture flourish? One of the keys researchers point to is Xieng Khuang's strategic position on the ancient trade routes of mainland Southeast Asia. The plateau sits at a natural crossroads between the Mekong valley, the highlands and the coast of what is now Vietnam, and valuable goods passed through it in ancient times: salt, metals, livestock and items for barter.
The concentration of jars along likely routes and passes suggests that the society that built them controlled or profited from this trade. An elite grown rich on commerce would have had the resources and organisation to carve and move such colossal stone monuments and to develop elaborate funerary practices, a common sign of hierarchical societies. Read this way, the jars were not only tombs but also markers of power and prestige in the landscape.
That culture, however, left no writing and no clearly identifiable descendants. At some point it vanished or changed, leaving the jars cut off from memory. In the centuries that followed, other peoples settled on the plateau with no direct link to the original builders. The urns remained as an enigmatic legacy, woven into local legend but detached from their real makers. It took 20th-century archaeology to begin examining them scientifically, and even today they hold more questions than answers. UNESCO's World Heritage listing in 2019 finally recognised their universal value and the need to protect them.
Long after the jar culture, the plateau became the heart of a historic principality: the kingdom of Xieng Khuang, also known by its old name of Muang Phuan, home mainly to the Phuan people, a Tai ethnic group. From the Middle Ages, this muang (principality) had its own dynasty and its own capital, the city of Xieng Khuang (today's Muang Khoun), which became a Buddhist centre with temples and stupas.
The story of Xieng Khuang was that of a small kingdom caught between larger powers. It fell within the orbit of the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang when Lan Xang was strong, but it was also fought over and pressured by its powerful neighbours: the Vietnamese kingdoms to the east, which demanded tribute, and the Tai-Siamese world to the west. Over the centuries the principality paid tribute to both sides to survive. It also suffered invasions, forced population transfers and looting, such as the devastating Vietnamese attack of the 19th century and the raids of the Haw ('Flag') bands that ravaged northern Laos.
When French colonialism arrived at the end of the 19th century, Xieng Khuang was absorbed into French Indochina as part of Laos. The French took an interest in the region, explored its jars and exploited some of its resources, but, as in most of the country, their presence was fairly light. The old capital kept its Buddhist temples and its provincial character. Nothing in those centuries of tribute and local wars, however, could foreshadow the catastrophe that would strike the plateau in the second half of the 20th century, when the Cold War turned this remote corner into one of the most heavily bombed places in human history.
Between 1964 and 1973, Xieng Khuang province became the epicentre of one of the most intense bombing campaigns ever unleashed, as part of what is known as the 'secret war'. While the world followed the Vietnam War, the United States waged a parallel, covert conflict in Laos, run largely by the CIA, with two aims: to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which North Vietnam used to supply the Viet Cong, and to hold back the Lao communist movement, the Pathet Lao. The Plain of Jars was fought over inch by inch between the Pathet Lao and their North Vietnamese allies on one side and pro-US forces, including General Vang Pao's secret Hmong army, on the other. It sat at the very centre of the storm.
The figures are hard to take in. Over nine years, the US air force flew hundreds of thousands of missions over Laos and dropped more than two million tonnes of bombs, which makes it the most heavily bombed country in history relative to its population. It is estimated that the equivalent of one planeload of bombs fell every eight minutes, day and night, for almost a decade. Because of its strategic value, Xieng Khuang took a huge share of that punishment. Whole villages were wiped out, the old capital of Muang Khoun was reduced to ruins, and civilians had to leave the surface and live hidden in caves and trenches, coming out only at night to farm. Many of the ancient jars were damaged by the explosions, and bomb craters can still be seen among them today.
This story should be told plainly and without embellishment. It was a human tragedy on an enormous scale, suffered by a farming population that mostly had little to do with the big decisions of the Cold War. Understanding it is an essential part of visiting the Plain of Jars, just as much as marvelling at the riddle of the stone urns.
The war ended and the Pathet Lao took power in 1975, but for Xieng Khuang the conflict left a deadly legacy that is still active half a century later: unexploded ordnance, known by its English acronym UXO. A huge share of the submunitions from cluster bombs (the ball-sized 'bombies') failed to detonate on impact and lay buried in fields, on paths and even among the jars themselves. Around eighty million unexploded submunitions are estimated to have been left scattered across Laos, and Xieng Khuang is one of the most contaminated provinces.
Since the war ended, this ordnance has killed and maimed thousands of people in Laos, many of them farmers who strike a bomb while ploughing or children who mistake a 'bombie' for a toy. The contamination holds back development: some land cannot be farmed, and some projects cannot go ahead until the ground has been cleared. Organisations such as the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), together with state programmes and international aid, have spent decades on the dangerous and painfully slow clearance work, which will take generations to finish. That is why the jars are visited along carefully marked paths, and why the information centres in Phonsavan devote so much space to educating people about UXO.
The people of Xieng Khuang have met this tragedy with remarkable resilience. In villages such as Ban Napia, they melt down the aluminium from war scrap, now inert, to make spoons and souvenirs. All over the province you see houses propped up on bomb casings and flowerpots made from shells, a telling example of weapons turned into tools for living. Today the Plain of Jars asks two things of the traveller, both of them respectful: wonder at an ancient archaeological enigma, and quiet reflection on one of the deepest wounds of the 20th century. Both stories, the ancient and the recent, share the same silent hills of the Xieng Khuang plateau.
