Pakse isn't the star of southern Laos, it's the region's great base of operations, and that's where its value lies. Set where the Xe Don flows into the Mekong, it's the largest and busiest city in the southern half of the country: the place where travellers land, make their plans and head out to discover the south's real treasures. From here you climb up to the Bolaven Plateau, home of the best Lao coffee and enormous waterfalls; drop down to Champasak, with its thousand-year-old Khmer temple; and carry on to the 4000 Islands, where the Mekong opens into a maze of water.
But Pakse has its own quiet charm. Its markets —the gigantic Dao Heuang, one of the largest in Laos— are a festival of colours, fruit, coffee and spices; its Buddhist temples and streets with colonial touches invite an unhurried stroll; and sunset over the Mekong, from the riverside promenade or from the famous palace-hotel that towers over the city, is a show in itself. It's a stopover city, yes, but one you'll actually enjoy.
This guide lays out the visit from a practical angle: what to see in Pakse itself, how to use it as a base for Bolaven, Champasak and the islands, how many days to spend, how to get there and get around, how much things cost, and where to eat and sleep. With Pakse as your headquarters, the whole of southern Laos —coffee, waterfalls, Khmer ruins and Mekong islands— opens up ahead of you.
Pakse is a relatively young city: the French founded it in 1905, at the confluence of the Mekong and the Xe Don, as the administrative centre of the south of colonial Indochina, to overshadow the old power of the kingdom of Champasak, whose capital lay downriver, near Wat Phou. Centuries earlier, this southern region had been a heartland of pre-Angkorian Khmer culture, and later one of the principalities into which the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang split. The royal family of Champasak kept a certain prestige well into the 20th century: its last great prince, Boun Oum, had a monumental palace built in Pakse that is now a hotel. With the war, the Pathet Lao victory and the proclamation of the Lao People's Democratic Republic in 1975, the Champasak monarchy disappeared and Pakse established itself as the economic capital of the south. The longer story of the kingdom of Champasak, Wat Phou and the colonial Mekong is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The deep south of Laos: the old Kingdom of Champasak and its Khmer temple of Wat Phou, a World Heritage Site; the cool Bolaven Plateau, home of Lao coffee since French times; and the 4000 Islands, where the Mekong scatters before reaching Cambodia.
Read the history of South (Mekong, coffee and islands) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
By Lao standards, Pakse is an almost brand-new city: it was born in 1905, when France founded it at the point where the Xe Don river flows into the Mekong. Its name says it all: 'Pak Se' means 'mouth of the Se', the mouth of the river. The French built it with a clear political aim: to create a modern administrative centre for the south of colonial Indochina and, along the way, to weaken the old kingdom of Champasak, whose court lay downstream, near the sacred Wat Phou.
But while the city is young, the land around it holds a history going back thousands of years. Long before Pakse existed, southern Laos was the heart of dazzling civilisations. Along these banks of the Mekong, pre-Angkorian Khmer culture flourished during the Chenla period, leaving in nearby Champasak one of its great sanctuaries, Wat Phou, which is older than Angkor itself. For more than a thousand years the region was a bridge between the Khmer, Mon and Lao worlds.
That's why understanding Pakse means looking beyond its colonial street grid: it is the modern capital of a very ancient south, the present-day gateway to a landscape steeped in history, coffee and water. The city that now serves as a base for travellers is just the latest chapter in a long saga that begins with Hindu kings and sacred mountains.
To understand Pakse you need to know the kingdom that came before it: Champasak. When the great Lao kingdom of Lan Xang — the 'kingdom of a million elephants' — broke apart in the early 18th century, one of its successor states was the kingdom of Champasak, in the far south, with its capital near Wat Phou and the Mekong. It was one of the three Lao principalities (along with Luang Prabang and Vientiane) into which the old power of Lan Xang split.
Like its neighbours, Champasak lived under the long shadow of the kingdom of Siam, which over the 19th century extended its rule over much of present-day Laos. Even so, the royal family of Champasak kept considerable local prestige and a dynastic continuity that set it apart. When France took over the Lao territories on the left bank of the Mekong in 1893, it folded the south into its Indochina, but allowed the house of Champasak to keep a certain symbolic rank.
The deep roots of this old southern aristocracy explain a key figure in modern history: Prince Boun Oum of Champasak, born in the early 20th century, heir to that lineage and one of the leading players in Lao politics in the middle of the century. Boun Oum embodied the conservative, pro-Western wing during the turbulent decades of war, and he left a monumental mark on Pakse: the gigantic palace that is now a hotel.
Founded by the French in 1905, Pakse grew quickly as the administrative, commercial and communications centre of the south. Avenues were laid out, government buildings and colonial-style houses went up, and, as in Savannakhet, large numbers of Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants arrived and gave trade a boost. The city became the place where the roads, the river and the business of southern Laos all came together.
One of the biggest legacies of the colonial era isn't in the city at all, but on the plateau that rises to the east: Bolaven. It was the French who, in the early 20th century, took advantage of the highland's cool climate and volcanic soils to introduce coffee growing. The gamble paid off: over time, Bolaven coffee became one of the best in Southeast Asia and a defining product of southern Laos, and its main distribution market is, of course, Pakse.
From the very start, then, the city was a creation of the colonial project: designed to administer, trade and exploit the resources of the south. But, as so often happens, it ended up developing a life of its own, blending French heritage, Lao culture, the Vietnamese and Chinese communities and the agricultural wealth of its surroundings. By the time French Indochina went into crisis in the mid-20th century, Pakse was already the undisputed capital of the south.
For Laos, the 20th century brought independence and war almost at the same time. After the Second World War, the Japanese occupation and the post-war years, Laos gained full sovereignty in 1954, but it was caught up in the Cold War and in the spillover from the Vietnam War. The country was split between the royal government, backed by the United States, and the communist Pathet Lao movement, supported by North Vietnam.
The south and east of the country suffered especially hard. Branches of the Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through the eastern mountains, and large areas were hit by an extremely intense bombing campaign that made Laos, relative to its population, the most heavily bombed country in history; its aftermath — unexploded ordnance — still lingers in the southern countryside today. In the middle of that conflict, Prince Boun Oum of Champasak played a leading political role as head of the Lao right, and in the 1960s he began building his monumental palace in Pakse, a symbol of his power.
The outcome was drastic. In 1975, the Pathet Lao victory ended the monarchy across the whole country and proclaimed the Lao People's Democratic Republic. The royal house of Champasak disappeared along with the others: Boun Oum went into exile, where he died a few years later, and his palace was left unfinished, a silent witness to the end of an era. The aristocracy that had ruled the south for centuries faded away for good.
After the hard post-war decades of planned economy and isolation that followed 1975, Pakse gradually regained its role as the economic capital of the south as the country opened up from the 1990s onwards. Today it is a lively, bustling city, the main hub for transport, trade and services in the southern half of Laos, and the obvious base for exploring the region's treasures.
Prince Boun Oum's old unfinished palace is now the Champasak Palace Hotel, and from its terraces you can look out over the city and the Mekong: an unexpected and somewhat melancholy ending to the dream of the south's last dynasty. Down below, the huge Dao Heuang market overflows with Bolaven coffee, fruit and spices; tuk-tuks and minivans ferry travellers to and from the plateau's waterfalls, the ruins of Wat Phou and the 4000 Islands; and at sunset the Mekong riverfront fills with people enjoying the river.
Pakse sums up southern Laos well: a young city looking out over a very ancient past, where Khmer and colonial heritage, the legacy of French coffee, the memory of vanished kings and the energy of a modern crossroads all live side by side. It isn't a destination of great monuments, but something perhaps more useful: the key that opens up one of the richest and least-visited corners of Southeast Asia.
