Chapter XVI: Knighted in the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha

Luang Prabang, venerable capital of the ancient kingdom of the same name, is a spacious town of a few wide French streets, softly paved, if at all, with narrow Laosian streets like lovers’ lanes between them. It is well wooded, with roomy yards usually whispering with palm-trees. In other words it is not a city at all, in the crowded, noisy, Western sense, but a leisurely congregation of separate dwellings of simple lines, each in its ample garden-park, or at least with sufficient ground so that its opinions or doings need not interfere with its neighbors. In short Luang Prabang town is in many ways what idealists picture the cities of Utopia to be, whatever insurance companies may think of the fire-risks involved in more thatch than tile roofs. It sits on a bank of the upper Mekong, more exactly the Me Nam Khong, that snaky dividing-line between Siam and at least half of Indo-China, which in time becomes one of the most important rivers of the Far East. Just here it happens that it is not the dividing-line, for a large chunk of Luang Prabang kingdom lies on the Siamese side of the river. Tiresome persons of statistical temperament tell us that the capital stands 340 meters, about 1135 feet, above sea-level; but one would hardly know it from the number of overcoats required. In fact, though it was still April, my host the _commissaire_ knew the futility of expecting a guest from the temperate zone to sleep until he had been cooled off with a jaunt by Ford through the tepid after-dinner night.

There were two Fords in Luang Prabang, that which had come for me at Don-mo and one belonging to the king. It would of course have been bad manners for the _commissaire_ openly to emphasize his real bosshood by sporting the better car; besides, the garage mechanics of the capital are as inexperienced as filling-stations are rare; hence the transportation that had been placed at my disposal lacked something of the regality of its rival, particularly in the matter of diligent polishing. There were also some horses, a few elephants, several victorias, even three or four rickshaws, though these, except perhaps that of the king inside the palace grounds, might as well not have been imported, for there were no men in this languid Eden both able and willing to pull them. Nearly every one walks in Luang Prabang, barefooted and silent, unless he travels by boat. For the most important conveyances are the long narrow pirogues, some of them surprisingly large, hollowed out of single tree-trunks, which ply the Mekong and the Nam-khan that flows into it above the town. On the bow of each boat there is almost sure to be a bouquet of flowers, a pretty custom, even if it is probably based on a superstition, and one in keeping with this gentle people of a land so kindly treated by nature. Huge fish are caught in the Mekong, weighing a hundred and fifty, two hundred, sometimes even two hundred and fifty—not pounds, but kilograms, fish so big that it takes ten men to carry one of them and one man to carry a severed head. It is easy to understand what the flap of such a fish-tail sometimes means to the fishermen in their frail vine-tied canoes. But it is just the fishing for such a people in such a climate; for every time they catch a fish they can—and usually do—rest for a week without going hungry. Racing pirogues as much as twenty paces long lie bottom up on bamboo-horses under little thatch roofs here and there upon the high weed-grown river-bank at the edge of the capital, being used only in November during the annual regattas. For rowing—more exactly paddling—is the athletic sport of Luang Prabang.

The main street of the capital, dying out at either end in semi-jungle, is lined by a long market, facing the entrance to the king’s palace. But for that matter there is a market just outside the royal palace in Madrid, too, and many beggars also, which here seem to be unknown, unless we count the yellow-clad priests sauntering along with their begging-bowls in the early morning. Even such an Eden as this is not without its serpents, however; and rattling chains on the legs of prisoners working about the town make strange contrast both to its quiet gentle atmosphere and to the regality of its king. The gay garments, especially of the female branch of the population, make doubly picturesque the market and the long lanes of greenery that represent streets. The women of Luang Prabang capital, unlike their country sisters in the rest of the kingdom, usually wear a thin silk or cotton scarf of bright color over their bare breasts, half covering them, and slipping coquettishly off when they wish to make an impression on one of the opposite sex. The Laosian women of the bush think no more of their uncovered breasts than they do of their bare feet; these sophisticated girls of the silken scarf in the capital recognize them as an asset. There was something about their every gesture that recalled our own flappers—with betel-nut taking the place of gum and of lip-stick. Yet their coquetry may be largely innocent, for the French assured me, in some cases rather regretfully, I thought, that in Laos there are few of the _congaïe_ facilities so common in Annam.

The king’s wives, and the girls of the royal family and of the wealthier class, wear a kind of swimming-vest, usually white, in addition to the brilliant scarf. Perhaps his Majesty does not wish charms meant for his own eyes alone to become even visually common property. Yet the royal wives themselves on the way to market had about them a hint of coquetry, even toward a foreigner, which seemed to be totally lacking among their sisters of the bush. Many of the girls of Luang Prabang wear enormous silver or pewter anklets, some of them weighing twenty piastres or more. Others wore chains of ten-cent pieces. So many French silver piastres have been turned into these anklets, bracelets, the metal collars of the Miao, and other forms of adornment that it is little wonder Indo-China now uses almost exclusively paper money.

Luang Prabang means Kingdom of the Divine Buddha. What more natural then than that there should be many Buddhist temples, shrines, and monasteries in its capital? Indeed there are so many on both sides of the river that the town might easily be mistaken for a holy city, devoted to priests and pilgrims. Some of the temple compounds are bare ground scattered with yellow-roofed buildings of Siamese or Burmese character, with big stupas made of mud bricks and more or less overgrown with vegetation, with mere cells raised on piles, in which languid bonzes meditate. Others are covered with groves of trees, shaded by masses of palm and banana leaves; but in them all great calm and quiet reigns. Just behind the main and market street fronting the royal palace is a rocky ridge called Pagoda Hill, two hundred feet above the plain and half encircled by the Nam-khan by which travelers unworthy of Fords come to the capital from the east or south. It is worth climbing if only for the view it offers of the idyllic city and its surrounding semi-jungle; and along it ramble queer old religious structures, including one built over a gigantic “footprint of Buddha” in the native rock. What feet that far-famed son of India had, and what seven-league boots, to have scattered, so long before the coming of railways and Fords, his bare footprints so far and wide over the Orient!

Some of the old priests of Luang Prabang are honored as demigods by the people of the kingdom. They step forth from their holy dwellings only with a ceremonial parasol held over them, by one of the surrounding group of youngster attendants in the same bright yellow; and the French _commissaire_ himself was almost servile in the respectful politeness with which he treated the most holy of them all, whose attitude sometimes suggested that it was he who had the upper hand. These bonzes may not even kill a flea, though the provocation must often be almost too strong to be borne; but they may eat beef and the flesh of other animals killed by some one else. Even the cynical French residents say they are real celibates, that they would be expelled from the order if they were caught breaking this particular vow. It might be harder to keep were not all young men expected to be priests for a year or two, as those of European lands become soldiers, only the ones to whom the monastic life appeals retaining the yellow robe, which the great majority soon discard for marriage. Little less sacred than the priests are the dogs that all but overrun the capital, eating the food laid out for gods and bonzes, much as the sacred oxen of India take their toll from pious shopkeepers. Held in a kind of Buddhist reverence by the people and more or less protected by the priests, these mongrels are not even subjected to muzzle or license, though the French would like to improve their rules of sanitation to the extent of exterminating the harmless but self-confident curs.

But the French do not insist on imposing their religious beliefs on their wards and colonies. In Luang Prabang they go so far as to provide for the up-keep of the temples and monasteries in the annual governmental budget. In a way this is a means of supporting the educational system, for the priests act as schoolmasters to their novices. In great contrast to China, there is not a single Christian missionary in all the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha, not even a Catholic priest. There was almost a sense of relief in finally getting completely beyond the reach of missions, however good an opinion one may form of mission work in some of its phases. For in certain moods one feels a species of boastfulness in our insistence that so alien a race give up its own beliefs in favor of our more or less generally accepted guess as to the after-world and how to reach it, in our Western efforts to impose our philosophy of life upon a people that has a not unworthy one of its own, and one that seems to make them much happier than we are.

I had come to Luang Prabang, however, on the special invitation of its king, and my chief duty and pleasure was to pay him my respects. Ignorance is ever embarrassing, so the natural prelude to such an honor as a royal audience was to find out something concerning the king and his kingdom, as one skims through the chapter-headings of an author one is about to meet. That ancient land is hardly known even to our encyclopedias, to say nothing of our school-books, but a few basic facts were available in the jungle-framed French offices of the capital, offices strangely similar in their atmosphere of _paperasses_ and official dignity to those French staff headquarters I had served in during the war. Languid as it is, Luang Prabang’s history is not without its exciting moments. For its origin one must go back to that great Nan-chao kingdom, with its capital at Tali-fu in the southwestern corner of China, founded in 629 A.D. and destroyed six centuries later (1234), not by the Chinese but by their Mongol ruler, Kublai Khan. The Kingdom of the Divine Buddha is one of the remnant kingdoms of the great Tai race which, once holding a part of what is now China, was gradually driven west and south, losing or attaining culture until it varied from the high civilization of the Khmer to almost illiterate tribes, according to where its new lot was cast. Best known to the outside world by the Siamese word for man (_lao_), or as _shan_, from a Chinese word used in Burma, this people still prefers to be called Tai.

Laos has eight divisions, of which Luang Prabang is the largest and the only one still boasting a king of its own. A century ago most of it belonged to ethnologically related Siam. I have already mentioned that this greatest division of French Indo-China, about as large and of much the same shape as Italy, has fewer inhabitants than Detroit. This is largely because it was so often sacked, and its people killed by the Chinese, who wanted the land, or carried off by the Siamese to populate her sparsely settled regions along the Menam. A traveler who visited Luang Prabang in 1872 found it the most compactly built city of Siam, with the single exception of Bangkok, which it in some respects resembled. But of several disasters the greatest seems to have been in 1887, when the Black Flags of Taiping days in China burned and almost completely destroyed and depopulated it, so that perhaps it is not by choice of its up-and-coming citizens that it is so roomy, pastoral, and ideal a city to-day.

The same altruism and love of their fellow-man that has given the French the arduous task of protecting the rest of Indo-China led to their present position in the affairs of Laos. About the time the Chinese from Yünnan were pillaging Luang Prabang kingdom a Frenchman named Pavie was sent there on a mission. The father of the present king, born _Tiao_ Kham Souk, who lived from 1837 until 1904 and reigned under the name of Ritthithamaronjsac—though he was more popularly known as King Zacharine, and probably not entirely on account of his sweet disposition—was an absolute despot, descended from a long direct line of similar rulers. For the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha has been a kingdom as far back as the memory of its people goes. Zacharine became a great friend of Pavie, at least according to such data as was available in the French government offices of Luang Prabang, and when the Siamese failed to protect him, as they had promised, against the Chinese, he went to Siam under Pavie’s wing; and later, in a quarrel with the Siamese, who had burned and looted and carried off most of the people of Vientiane and Xieng Khuang, he made the mistake, like his royal neighbors of Annam and Cambodia, of calling in the French. By 1893 Siam had been compelled to give up all claim to this ancient kingdom and to the magnificent highlands of Tran-ninh, and all Laos became a European dependency under the protection of France.

My host the _commissaire_ chose a victoria for our descent upon his royal ward, no doubt feeling that to have used his Ford would be to call unnecessary attention to himself as the only possessor, besides his Majesty, of so regal a conveyance. Besides, the leisurely open carriage was far more in keeping with the calm and woodsy atmosphere of the metropolis of Laos. The king’s palace is a building mainly in French style, more like a hotel with a steeple-cupola than the abode of an Oriental potentate. It stands in a fairly spacious yard, not quite large enough to be worthy the name of park, on the eastern bank of the Mekong, at the foot of the hill graced by Buddha’s footprint; and it was somewhat in disorder. Chairs were kicking about the foreign-style dining-room, and there were other suggestions of a late party and oversleeping servants. The building was quite new, it seemed; there were few decorations on the walls yet, though a man had come all the way from Paris to cover them with paintings. Evidently he had found the climate not conducive to constant work, particularly work paid for by the day by a protected people; for surely he could not have discovered a means of squandering his time in the social amenities of the king’s harem, and there was no other means of accounting for his Oriental leisureliness of execution.

Royal servants went to announce us, though word of our coming had been sent ahead, and while we waited I mentally reviewed the information I had gleaned from the Oriental Almanach de Gotha it had been my privilege to consult at French headquarters on the eve of my royal reception. I make no claim as to its exactness, and still less to that of my memory; but there is a probability that both of them are approximately correct. _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah, present king of Luang Prabang and a direct descendant of an endless line of its kings, was born in 1885, on July 14—no wonder he is a favorite of the French—and succeeded his father Zacharine in 1904. His mother was not his mother, so to speak. For _Tiao_ Thong Di, first wife of Zacharine, still known as the Queen Mother, and real ruler of the royal household, bossing even the king himself in domestic matters, according to reliable verbal information from a French and feminine source, had no male children. The second-rank wife, _Tiao_ Thong Si, daughter of a high mandarin related to the royal family, gave birth to the present monarch; but in Laos as in China every child is officially the offspring of the first wife. His father Zacharine seems to have been a temperate person, considering his advantages, for the king has only three half-brothers and six half-sisters; though it is possible that Zacharine died with certain secrets buried in his bosom, Occidental fashion. Half-sisters and half-brothers may marry in Luang Prabang, by the way, which is not without its effect on the reigning house. Also _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah has at least this much in common with his English colleague, that he had an older brother who died, leaving him unexpectedly heir to the throne.

The latest calculations were that the present king had fifteen wives and about forty children; on this second point he did not seem to be very exact himself, no doubt finding it difficult to keep strictly up to date in domestic events within his household. Yet he did not look either worn or dissipated, when presently he came in to shake hands and sit down with us, perhaps because the Queen Mother takes so many of the palace cares off his shoulders. Seven of his sons were studying at the _Lycée_ in Hanoï; and the crown prince, Savang Vathama, then sixteen, was nearing his bachelor degree in a similar institution at Montpellier in France, with the avowed intention of studying law afterward. The king himself had a purely Laosian education under Buddhist priests until King Zacharine sent him to a French _collège_ at Saïgon. Later he went to the Ecole Coloniale in the Rue de l’Observatoire in Paris, where French youths prepare for a career in the colonies. He came home once when his father was ill, but upon his recovery was sent back to France to get together a printing establishment with Laosian characters and to learn how to run it, which makes him more or less related to the late kaiser, bookbinder.

The king was plump and pleasant, handsome for his race, by no means betraying his all but forty years. It was easy to imagine the girls of Luang Prabang, if not indeed of France, “just crazy” about him, quite aside from his royal rank. He had a frail Oriental mustache and that beautiful bronze-brown complexion of his race. Unlike most European monarchs he is purely of the blood of those he reigns over. But his Majesty indulges in the chief minor vice of his people, and the only blot on his manly beauty, and not even that of course to the fair ones of his own land, was that his teeth, though they were not enameled, were discolored and his lips somewhat bloody with betel-juice. Even now he seemed to be nursing a quid, though with a regal finesse that it would have done our secret chewers of tobacco good to see.

He wore a white cork helmet, a black bow-tie about a standing white collar on a stiff white shirt with the round cuffs of a decade or more ago, and a snow-white three-button coat which, in so far as my meager knowledge in sartorial matters is trustworthy, was of the latest model. The fact that the middle buttonhole was attached to the upper button may have meant either a dreadful ignorance of Western ways or merely unseemly haste in leaving his harem; or it may have had no significance whatever. His feet were quite properly incased in low black shoes of faultless last and luster, but—let the spinster reader blushingly turn the page here—he wore no trousers! His rank and calling, it seems, forbade him these final touches to an otherwise perfectly European costume. Instead, his thighs were inclosed in the _pha_ or _sampot_, such as is worn by both sexes in Siam and adjoining countries under Siamese influence. It was a kind of short skirt, evidently of silk and of colors verging on the gaudy, drawn between the legs and tucked into the belt at the back, reaching to just below the knees in front and “rather less than ‘arf o’ that be’ind.” Naturally a full-fledged king could not leave the hiatus uncovered and keep his self-respect. Therefore between _sampot_ and shoes the royal legs were clad in silk stockings of which the most regal young lady of our own land might have been proud—except that in her case they would no doubt have been of a color to deceive the uninformed observer into thinking she wore no stockings whatever, whereas in backward barbarian Luang Prabang this would have been bad form. These were jet-black and reached so far up the back as to suggest that they were held by a band about the waist. Indeed, it was immediately evident that the king had missed a splendid chance for extra decoration by not wearing a pair of red garters just below the knees.

A goodly proportion of the royal income must be spent on stockings. For I was assured, not merely by common rumor but by all the Frenchwomen in Luang Prabang—of whom there are three or four—that his Majesty will under no circumstances wear anything but silk about his shapely legs, and that a stocking with the slightest hole in it is immediately discarded. It would be easy to imagine his wives, of whom he fortunately has fifteen, scrambling for these discards of the royal wardrobe, and racing for their darning needles, were it not that in Laos even the wives of kings do not wear stockings.

But do not for a moment gather from all this that _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah had the slightest hint of the barbarian in his appearance. Except for the sacred _sampot_ in place of trousers, and the proof of a king’s income between that and the shoes, his Majesty would have attracted no attention whatever in a Palm Beach crowd, unless it were by his athletic build and his agreeable undissipated smile, and, at close range, the light touch as of fresh blood on his lips beneath the thin well clipped mustache. In fact of all the kings with whom I have hobnobbed he was the most pleasing to look upon, and to all outward appearances a gentleman not even given to bullying his wives. His lapel was adorned with the little red button of a French decoration—the Legion of Honor, I fancy, though I confess to a deplorable ignorance of these important matters—and a gold watch-chain hanging from this drew attention to what was evidently not the thinnest of watches in the outside breast-pocket. A signet-ring not unlike those of our West Point and Annapolis graduates encircled his wedding finger, and he wore a cord of what looked like ordinary string about each wrist.

This cord decoration is something peculiar to Luang Prabang. The _commissaire_ wore them also, as did his baby son; possibly his charming lady did too, though I am not sure that mere women are worthy of them. Cords are put about the wrists amid elaborate ceremonies and must be worn for at least seven days if they are to be effective in preserving the wearer from evil. The king himself had come to tie those about the wrists of the _commissaire’s_ newly born son and heir and thereby assure it constant good luck through all the menaces to health among European infants living in the tropics. The French are good colonists partly because of their wisdom in keeping up and even taking part in such simple and harmless native customs, which the average American and British colonial official would probably scorn as “poppycock,” if he did not actually try to uproot them. “Poppycock” it is, to be sure, but the effect which a little sympathy in such matters has on native populations is not.

The king spoke a fair but throaty French, but was not exactly talkative in that tongue, whatever he may be in his own and in the intimacies of his harem. In fact, contrary as it may be to our movie and popular-novel conception of royalty, he was rather bashful, with a school-boy dread of making a mistake in the foreign tongue he was using, and at the same time evidently fearful of doing or saying anything that might displease the French. His demeanor was a curious mixture of regal old-family pride, a pride reaching so far back that we mere moderns from a barbarian world were not worthy of knowing the secrets of life behind it, and of the anxiety of the star in a royal movie being filmed under the eye of the manager of the great Jewish corporation that is “putting him across.” All of which did not remove the first impression that _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah would be a fine fellow to take along for a tramp or a swim, and that it would not be long before one could begin calling him “Prah Old Top.”

All hands seemed a little ill at ease. Having exchanged the usual platitudes, we stood about doing nothing much, paused with admiring mien before a new bronze bust of the king, covered with medals and decorations, and a good likeness, though of no better color than his actual complexion, but showing neither the betel-red lips nor the cigarette that drips almost incessantly from them. His Majesty handed out atrocious French tobacco-monopoly cigars worthy of a Chinese _tuchun_, but wisely stuck to cigarettes himself, smoking one after another in rapid succession. We chatted a little on general subjects, the impression growing that the king’s French was good enough if only he could have thrown off the feeling that it would be an intolerable disgrace for a king to make an error in speech. Can it be this that makes modern monarchs and presidents so taciturn? Among the thoughts that passed between us I gathered that he wished to visit the emperor of Annam when Khai-dinh celebrated his birthday the following year. I have never heard whether he was able to do so, but if he and his fellow-protégé, whom he so far had never met, were allowed to get together out of hearing of the French they must have had a great chat—provided of course that they had a language in common.

At a mere suggestion from my companion, and as if it were a relief from a tense situation, his Majesty graciously stepped to the main doorway of the palace, an excellent jet-black background for a blazing tropical sunshine that outdid anything Hollywood can devise in lighting-effects, and posed for his photograph. Another merest hint from the _commissaire_ and _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah went off at once like a small boy to dress up for his picture, and came back in a surprisingly short time in his most regal robes, a radiant royal costume quite beyond my power to describe. All the medals on the breast of bronze near-by were now in place on the living model; he was again in women’s silk stockings, quite evidently brand new, and this time held up by round-the-leg garters of brilliant hue. A green and saffron flowered-silk _sampot_—but how foolish for a man who cannot even describe a ball-dress well enough to give his wife any conception of it to attempt so impossible a job as this!

Never have I found a king more docile in meeting my every suggestion. Barely a whisper from me and he ordered his throne-room decked out in its coronation best, had his royal attendants summoned. Cringing flunkies brought in swords of state, big golden bowls, a marvelous hat of half cowboy half women-of-the-plume-days style, studded with jewels, and with a Burmese-pagoda top. Ascending his throne, the king assumed his most regal aspect, his white gloves flashing like those of a traffic policeman during a Catholic procession. The master of ceremonies of the palace himself brought tables and other regal paraphernalia to offset my lack of a tripod; two men in green, each holding a great sword, knelt fearfully at the foot of the throne, and—and I muffed the picture. No doubt the nervous tension of photographing kings on their thrones in their coronation-robes would be enough to cause an even calmer and more experienced photographer to misjudge tropical light conditions; at any rate I so under-exposed that strip of film that only those with keen eyesight can make out more than the general lay-out of the throne, and the king’s white-gloved hands on his richly sampotted knees.

Lesser catastrophes have left broken hearts, but it did not so much matter about that throne-room picture after all, for, again at the merest suggestion of the _commissaire_ and as promptly as a circus seal obeys its trainer, the king once more stepped to the spotlighted doorway of the palace, hat, robes, medals, and all, to give my camera another trial, finally posing with his French boss at his side. The _commissaire_ was also in all his glory. Three great medals that proved he had done this, that, or some other brave deed—for he was not a man to have successfully bootlicked this, that, or the other high authority—blazed over his heart. His white uniform coat and black trousers had fancy neck, waist, wrist, and trouser-seam bands; he wore a sword, with rich belt-tassels, and carried white gloves, though the white _casque_ on his head and the black shoes on the blistering pavement had nothing unusual about them. In short his dress was as out of keeping with his plebeian name of Mill—were names translated—as it was with the simple backwoods life about us. Finally his Majesty, of his own volition unless my eyes were momentarily off their guard, was graciously moved to insist that I also stand beside him in the doorway spotlight and let the camera again do its worst. In vain did I plead my unworthiness to be thus immortalized, like one of the boon companions of his Majesty, particularly in my vagabondish incongruities of rumpled semi-whites, once-tan shoes still half decided to be black, a necktie that insisted on the right to be temperamental in a tropical climate, a pocket bulging full of—how should I know what? The king, I long afterward noticed, wore quite a different face in these pictures in true royal garb than that of the genial boulevardier he presented in mufti, something like his own elder brother, with all the cares of state upon his shoulders.

But all this was only the beginning of the honors that were heaped upon me before that epoch-making day was done! Immediately after the signal distinction of being photographed by the resplendent _commissaire_ at the side of the even more luminiferous king I was knocked breathless—or at least I might have been if the _commissaire_ had not that morning whispered to me the possibility of what was to happen next, probably before the king himself had thought of it; in fact there had been subtle hints to that effect as far back as Xieng Khuang, if not in Hanoï itself—by the announcement that his Majesty was about to confer upon me his most regal decoration, the most prominent of the many medals on the breasts of the _commissaire_ and of the king himself, both in bronze and in the flesh, the highest honor of which this protected Oriental potentate is capable, something corresponding in Luang Prabang to the order of the Rising Sun in Japan, to wit: the order of the Million Elephants and the White Parasol! For you must know that Luang Prabang is not only the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha but even more officially the Kingdom of the Million Elephants and the White Parasol, just as King Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah’s real title is Master of Heaven and of Life. I do not know whether it is actually claimed that there are so many pachyderms in the kingdom at the same time, but a little exaggeration is always admissible in the tropics; or it may be that the souls of departed elephants are also included in the reckoning.

The king announced his magnificent intention by a little speech in French, with a manner strangely like that of a school-boy sentenced to make the class presentation speech to a favorite teacher, and from it I gathered that I was to be decorated because I was the only American—and the word he used made it mean of either North or South America—who had ever done his humble capital the honor of visiting it. The only one of whom there is any official record, no doubt he meant, if indeed he was not indulging in a bit of royal spoofing; for it is known by many, if not by the king himself, that at least one Protestant missionary once came through the kingdom on a scouting expedition, and the chances are that he was American. But naturally he had not announced himself to the constituted authorities of a country that does not allow Christian mission work, and it may be that he did not enter the capital.

I had hitherto always been under the delusion that the bestowal of an order meant the pinning on of the corresponding medal by the bestower’s own fair or sunburned hands, and with war days in France in mind I knew not what moment I might get a betel-juicy royal kiss on either cheek. But this dreadful misgiving was but another evidence of my appalling ignorance. On the contrary, to be decorated evidently meant merely being given permission to decorate myself. It is true that there was handed me later in the day an engraved diploma, in Siamese and French, bearing here and there three elephant-heads surmounted by a white parasol, and with my name written on the dotted line by a master penman who certainly had not learned his calling in a Buddhist-monk school. It was neatly rolled inside a section of bamboo to protect it from the rainy season that was almost certain to break upon me before I reached modern forms of transportation again. In fact I am not sure that the king did not personally bring me this diploma, though I do know that it was prepared in the French-staff-like government offices far from the royal palace. But the medal itself, the visible public proof that I have been honored beyond any of my fellow-countrymen, any of my fellow-hemispherites for that matter, I should have to spend many francs for in a department-store at Hanoï, if ever I reached there again. Being as Scotch of disposition as I am abhorrent of the red tape incident to making a purchase in a French department-store, I should certainly never have squandered that hard-earned money, even with the franc at one of its lowest ebbs, had not the family tyrant absolutely insisted, refusing even to discuss the matter. She won of course, and the gaudy elephantine-parasol trinket and the ribbon in Spanish colors that goes with it has been tucked away somewhere among my rarely-unpacked belongings ever since. Ah, those happy bachelor days when a man could do exactly as his whims or his conscience prompted!

I might wear that medal now, or at least the modest lapel-ribbon that stands for it, if I did not realize the injustice that would be to those of my veteran friends who, having risked their eyesight and digestion at Paris and Chaumont over maps of the western front, are entitled to display similar adornments to an envious, disappointed world, or if I were not fearful of being mistaken for a visiting Elk or Moose or some other fraternal wild animal and dragged into the gilded cages provided for those creatures. My resentment at being forced after all to decorate myself, by way of the pocketbook, has subsided, for it seems the same rule is true of Phi Beta Kappa pins and class numerals; but I shall never entirely forgive Luang Prabang for bringing me as near as I ever expect to come to the divorce courts. For when everything was over, and I had broken the great news to my son at Hanoï in the telegrams we exchanged on that most auspicious occasion, which chanced also to be his fourth birthday, I discovered to my domestic dismay and perpetual regret that the order of the Million Elephants and the White Parasol is also conferred upon women—at least of France and allied countries—and that if the king had suspected that I had a wife—queer I did not show it after nearly five years of married life!—he would have—but what is the use of bewailing what is past and done with and irreparable?

The decoration speech over, the king ordered out his dancing-girls, deathly pale with hastily floured faces, and his male entertainers, in masks meant to be terrifying, the gaudy colors of their festive garments contrasting with the scarcity of soap discernible through the crevices of their costumes. They posed rather fearfully. Some of the girls were as young as ten, I am sure, and certainly none of them were over twenty, for the king has a Broadway taste in these matters. Dancing-girls and masked male figures alike wore an elaborate head-dress in the form of a pagoda—the Rangoon style of pagoda, not those of China—which suggested a close cultural relationship between Luang Prabang and Cambodia. As to the welter of colors that flashed forth from them in the blazing tropical sunshine I shall not even attempt to say anything; just let the bootlegged imagination run riot, so long as you do not forget the reddish teeth and the swollen lips driveling with betel-nut that gave them the look of ghouls that had just eaten a warm corpse, or of harmless childish-faced trolls that had been caught in the act of gorging themselves with currant jelly in the royal jam closet.

Neither the dancers nor their king gave any sign that I had outstayed my welcome; nor was I expected to back away from his Majesty when at last I voluntarily took my leave. But I have a suspicion that there was more frankness in the attitude of the baby elephant that was cavorting about the royal lawn in the wake of its chained and mahout-ridden mother. For when I tried to coax it into a proper filial position for a photograph the little beast set out after me in a manner entirely out of keeping with its status as the property of a tame king. So graphically could I still describe this experience when I reached Hanoï again that to this day my son regards the time when the elephant “switched its trunk” about me as the height of my intrepid career.

The king of Luang Prabang keeps a number of royal elephants; and he is no nonentity as a business man either, by the way. Supplementing his salary, if the word suits a monarch, of forty-six thousand piastres a year, and thereby offsetting his consumption of silk stockings, he has much private property, including great forests and sawmills, in which many of his elephants work for him. For a time some of the royal elephants were assigned the task of dragging rollers used in the making of roads about the capital; but they are a tender beast, for all their size and reputed longevity, and even with only four or five hours of labor a day, at their two-mile-an-hour gait, with the privilege of resting every third day, two of them died from this unwonted exertion. The king, evidently no figurehead in his capacity as business manager of his personal estates and property, protested, and from four to six water-buffaloes to each roller now take the place of an elephant.

In theory the many wild elephants in the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha also belong to the king. When new recruits are needed in the royal stables, some of the wild beasts are caught by digging pits. Then a tame and a wild one are chained together, leaving the wild elephant to tug furiously at a collar with sharp iron points in it. The most bellicose are fastened to a tree by a lasso about a hind leg until they are worn out with struggle and hunger, when the two largest _éléphants de chasse_ available take the captive between them and shake and roll him until he decides, like the man who foresees the lawyer fees involved in an action for divorce, that after all he will be happier in the domestic state. Most of those captured do not wait for this third degree, but, suddenly resigned to their new fate, give in to the barbed collar and stroll homeward with their false brother, pulling up tufts of good grass as they go and calmly tapping each mouthful on a front foot to shake the earth off the roots before transferring it to their dainty mouths.

Whatever the baby elephant may have meant by accelerating my exit from the palace grounds, the king himself evidently had no intention of dismissing me so cavalierly. For within an hour of our arrival home, that is, at the rambling one-story soft-brick house of the _commissaire_, with its crowing roosters—if I could rule a king I should at least banish roosters from the back yard on which the windows of my honored guests opened—his Majesty came alone in his Ford to return my call and stay to lunch. He had changed back into civilian garb—not the same garments of course in which he had first received me—perfectly European again except for another gay silk _sampot_ and black silk stockings out of a newly opened box. Were kings relieved of the task of dressing and undressing, what duties would there be left for most of them anyway? He was received like any other invited luncheon guest, though he was always addressed as _Majesté_ by the _commissaire_ and his well chosen wife, and the half-dozen French functionaries they had been able to scrape together in the kingdom. In lieu of a box of chocolates his Majesty had sent ahead some Laosian food that is served as dessert at the royal table. One dish was a kind of custard cooked in small cocoanuts, the base of the husk cut down to resemble the shank of a goblet, and preserving the cocoanut taste. Another was a kind of vermicelli covered with nut dust, not unlike a similar dish in China. The ordinary people do not indulge in such delicacies, which are reserved for the royal palace. Even there, according to my hostess, there are few changes of menu. The king was well versed in Western table manners, though he did not take a very active part in the conversation, which of course was in French. He showed up best as a sympathetic listener, and was easily amused. In so far as my own almost unknown country was concerned, he seemed to be particularly interested in the Mormons and in what the French call the _régime sec_. He laughed for some time in his merry yet kingly way when told that Brigham Young had forty wives and a corresponding number of children, apparently without seeing any connection between this and his own fifteen and forty respectively. Or it may be that he was laughing at the plight of Brigham from the vantage-point of his own experience. The _régime sec_, in other words, prohibition, he plainly did not understand at all, any more than does the average Frenchman, and there was nothing to be gained in trying to make clear the American point of view on the subject. He would of course have been horrified to learn that there are persons in that benighted wineless land from which I came who have never heard of his ancient kingdom; nor did I feel it quite safe to pad out the conversation by bringing up the question of silk stockings in its relation to our national economic problem, for one can never be sure just how sensitive kings may be on these very personal matters.

It became more and more evident, however, that _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah was not born anybody’s fool, even if circumstances and the foolishness of his father Zacharine had left him and his kingdom in an embarrassing position. There was something behind his Oriental-Gallic courtesy and his almost perpetual smile. Nor did he seem to take himself or his regality or his white elephants or any of the rest of his royal trappings too seriously. On this subject of white elephants, by the way, he mentioned that one was now supposed to be on its way to him, some Laosian merchants among his loyal subjects having captured or purchased such an animal that had been seen in a distant part of his kingdom. He thought Bangkok used to have one but that his Siamese peer was now forced to do without this adornment to their respective kinghoods. They were not white anyway, he went on, but rather a pinkish light-gray, like the albino water-buffalo; and his manner implied that whatever his royal cousin of Siam might think about it, a white elephant to him would be merely an interesting addition to his menagerie. “May you live as long as an elephant!” is a common form of greeting in some parts of the East; but quite aside from the doubtful kindness involved, it is based on one of those many mistaken beliefs of mankind, according to the king, corroborated by all the French present, who asserted that no elephant ever lives longer than have many men and women. As monarch of what may be the most elephant-infested corner of the globe he should be a credible witness on the subject.

All through the luncheon the punka over our heads had moved in fitful spurts, for the coolie squatting on the cool _dalles_ of the veranda outside fell asleep even in the presence of royalty. His Majesty was as hard to get rid of as an awkward country cousin, and the hostess grew visibly fidgety before he finally remounted his Ford, for her other guests included the doctor who should long since have been back at the government hospital, and other functionaries eager to take up their protective duties again, yet who could not of course show any desire to leave so long as their monarch and master remained. One somehow had the feeling that a king would wish to get back to his affairs of state, or at least to his harem, as soon as possible, but this one gave evidence of so greatly enjoying his luncheon party that he seemed capable of sitting there forever listening and smiling.

There are really four kings in the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha, or were until one of them recently died. None of them are to be replaced, however, as they pass on toward Nirvana, except this real one with the title of _Majesté_. The others are merely _Excellences_. Twice a year all the chiefs of Luang Prabang, which is a province of Laos as well as a kingdom, come to the capital for a conference under the French _commissaire_. It is a leisurely conference, one fancies, for the people of Luang Prabang, high or low, do not include the word “hurry” in their active vocabulary. Not long before, the king had gone to Hanoï, whether for praise or a scolding no one but the governor-general seemed to know. Nine of his suite missed the return train to Vinh, and one old mandarin wept like a child because he could not believe that anything, six-o’clock trains particularly, started at the very moment these strange white people said it would. He had been barely half an hour late, yet the conveyance had left without him! From Vinh, by the way, all but the most important members of the party had to walk home with the coolies, while the king proceeded by automobile over the route by which I had come. Even the prince who had been sent to meet me at Muongyu had made this long tramp. Evidently the position of prince has its drawbacks in an ostensibly absolute Oriental monarchy—for that Luang Prabang still purports to be, with the French merely advisers to the hereditary despot. You may marry a king’s daughter, but that does not mean that you may ride in the king’s Ford. But the travelers by automobile gained nothing in time, for the whole outfit had to wait a couple of weeks at Xieng Khuang until the baggage caught up with it, while the undressed monarch remained officially incognito until his trunks arrived. On another occasion a French aviator took him to his forest-girdled capital in a single day.

There are ceremonial occasions when the king comes to the home of the _commissaire_, not by Ford but on an elephant, and is carried up the steps seated on his throne, white parasols over him and a great retinue about him. The French residents condoled with me particularly because I had not reached Luang Prabang _quinze jours_—a fortnight—earlier. For in the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha New Year’s had fallen on April 12 that year, and with it comes the ceremony of the _petit serment_, as distinguished from the _grand serment_ in November; that is, the swearing of fealty to the French and to the king—please note the order. Then the king rides on several elephants, I gathered, though probably only one at a time, and is carried through the town on his throne, followed by long processions of notables and mandarins in white jackets and _sampots_ of every color of the rainbow, if not indeed several which it lacks. The common people, all the inhabitants of the capital except the Annamese and the French, kneel and bow their heads to the earth, for then they must not look upon their king, though it is said a few of the least reverent sometimes do get a glimpse _à la dérobée_. To judge by the pictures French residents had taken of the recent ceremony it was a sight worth coming two weeks earlier to see. In them all the inevitable cigarette was dangling from the king’s lips; no ceremony is so solemn, no place so sacred, that _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah will go without his smoke. As many a photograph of the few remaining European monarchs and their possible successors shows, he has good precedent for thus openly indulging. Perhaps it is a sign of increasing democracy; or such informal and plebeian habits may always have been shared by kings, though our expurgated histories do not mention them. Cigarette or Ford, however, the people of Luang Prabang take their king very seriously, more seriously than he does himself. The native doctor at the government hospital, educated in Hanoï and outwardly entirely French except in complexion, kneels and touches his forehead to the floor before he gives medicine to one of the king’s sons in the palace nursery.