HMONG, MEANS FREE PEOPLE

Laos, Plain of Jars, amazing place with hundreds of ancient stone jars, nobody knows where from and what’s the story behind. Scattered here and there around Phonsavan, the ugliest city I’ve ever seen.
This is also the place, where Americans dropped 2 milion ton of bombs (spending 2 mln dolars a day for 9 years during Vietnamese war). Nobody knows how many people lost their lives. And still huge amount of UXO wound or kill 300 people every year...

Me and Jane, American girl I met in bus from Luang Prabang (and my roommate in Phonsavan), booked the trip to Plain of Jars. Three more people joined making our trip cheaper, 80 000 kip instead of 120 000 each. Team occured to be very international, there were Australian-French couple, German guy, Jane, American, me, Polish, and – last but not least – our driver, a round-faced Lao with the great nice smile. We agreed to visit Hmong village first.

Hmongs are perceived as the proudest of Northern hill tribes people. Hmong means free people. They came to Laos from China in XIX century where they had suffered atrocities. They settled down in high parts of mountains in Northern Burma, Thailand and Laos and started their jungle-burning and planting opium agriculture life style. In XX century they were offered citizenships and land ownerships from Thai government, but of course they were smart enough not to take it. First, there was no point to expose themselves for a quick recognition, second not to loose identity and freedom. The land was theirs anyway, as long as they were living high enough, hidden deeply in jungle, not speaking any official languages, and yet every 3 or 4 years changing the place of living according to soil impoverishing.
They had been doing it for years untill the 70-ies when international community was horrified by a huge amount of Southeast-Asian opium which flooded Europe and America. (Yeah, really it’s not that nice to smoke opium ☺) So they decided to do something. That didn’t change much apart from the opium prices went highier and highier as the thing were getting harder to get, increasing opium kings’ profits and deteriorating hill tribes’ life conditions. That also meant brutal wars for power between kings, Kuomintang and corrupted officials. As Hmongs were well-known for being good fighters, they were often used as soldiers in those wars, as well as earlier in 60-ies by CIA in a “Secret War” to fight the communists, being vaguely promised an autonomy.
They paid the biggest price for their freedom-loving nature, either in Laos, as well as in Burma and Thailand. They were used and then persecuted, many people lost their lives. Governments, doesn’t matter, monarchist, communist or democratic, don’t wish to have any free people in „their” countries… From Laos a lot of them managed to escape to USA, but the soul of the nation was destroyed forever...

So we entered the village, sad and miserable remains of the proud and free nation they once had been...

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