"In a bad year, it is not only the plows that break, but the hearts too." -- Pira Sudham, "People of Isan"
The recorded history of Laos begins with the reign of the 14th-century Fa Ngum, a former exile at the Khmer court who not only succeeded in unifying his fragmented province, but expanded its territory into large areas of present-day northern and eastern Thailand.
By 1884, the French had already annexed Cochin China, established a protectorate in Cambodia and successfully concluded treaties establishing other protectorates in Tonkin and Annam. Laos was next in line. Control over Laos was secured in 1893 after the signing of a joint French-Siamese treaty giving the latter jurisdiction over all ethnic Lao living in a 25-km zone west of the Mekong River. Further treaties in the early part of the next century effectively left the whole of the Korat Plateau, with its population of ethnic Lao -- more than three times that of French Laos -- stranded in the new Siamese territories across the river. Today, large numbers of ethnic Lao still live in the northeastern provinces of Thailand, particularly Isan.