Plain of Jars — megalith
Jakub Hałun · CC BY-SA 4.0

Plain of Jars

  • Elevation1,200 m
  • 2 min read
  • 19.431° N 103.153° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • The heaviest of the stone jars are estimated to weigh up to about 14 tonnes, yet they were moved from quarries kilometres away.
  • At Site 75, a single jar about 1.3 metres high and over 2 metres wide held the bones of at least 37 people, adults and children alike.
  • Radiocarbon dates from that Site 75 jar show it was reused for burials over generations, roughly between AD 890 and 1160.
  • Quarries near Jar Sites 2 and 3 still hold half-carved jars embedded in the bedrock, abandoned mid-way through their shaping.
  • Experimental archaeology has shown the jars could have been shaped with stone tools alone, without iron chisels.
  • Some jars appear to have come from a quarry nearly 100 kilometres from where they now stand.
  • About 200 carved stone discs have been found; none fit the jar mouths, so they are thought to be burial markers rather than lids.
  • A natural limestone cave at Site 1 has two man-made holes in its roof, interpreted as chimneys of an ancient crematorium.
  • The carved frogman on the Site 1 jar has been compared with the Huashan rock paintings in Guangxi, China, of 500 BC to AD 200.
  • An estimated 270 million cluster bomblets fell on the area in 1964–1969, and around 80 million of them never exploded.

Why it is worth it

The Plain of Jars is scattered across the Xiangkhoang Plateau in northern Laos: thousands of great stone vessels standing on hillsides and ridges, in clusters from a single jar to several hundred. They are between one and three metres tall, cylindrical, wider at the base than at the mouth, and hewn from sandstone, granite, conglomerate, limestone or breccia. More than a hundred jar sites are known in the province, with over 2,100 jars documented. Most are plain; a single jar at Site 1 carries a carved human figure, the so-called frogman, and stone discs found nearby are decorated with human and animal shapes.

The jars are prehistoric and connected with the dead. The French archaeologist Madeleine Colani, who studied them in the 1930s, found burnt bone, teeth and glass beads inside and burials around them, and concluded that they belonged to an Iron Age funerary tradition. Later excavations have confirmed that bones were placed in and around the jars, sometimes over many generations; studies of Site 1 suggest that its jars were first set up as early as 1240–660 BC, from stone brought from a quarry about eight kilometres away. Local legend offers another answer: the giant king Khun Cheung had the jars made to brew rice wine for a victory feast.

The plateau also carries the marks of the 20th century. Between 1964 and 1969 it was heavily bombed during the so-called Secret War in Laos, and a large share of the munitions failed to explode. Clearance by the Mines Advisory Group with UNESCO in 2004–2005 and 2007 opened seven jar sites to visitors, among them Sites 1, 2 and 3 near Phonsavan and Site 52, the largest known, with 392 jars near a Hmong village reached only on foot. The Plain of Jars was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2019.

Getting there

Site 1, the most visited, is close to the town of Phonsavan, about 5 km away. Xieng Khouang Airport (XKH) in Phonsavan is the main gateway for visitors to the jars; Luang Prabang International Airport (LPQ) is about 116 km away in a straight line. The other cleared sites are reached by road from Phonsavan.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Laos 9The Most Remarkable Megaliths 8The Most Mystical Archaeological Sites 11The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Monuments 20The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Squares, Streets and Monuments 33The Most Remarkable Monuments 56The Most Mystical Archaeological Wonders 73The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Sites 114The Most Mystical Places 138The Greatest UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Wonders 149The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments 173The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites 193The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

The Plain of Jars is a megalithic archaeological landscape in Laos. It consists of thousands of stone jars scattered around the upland valleys and the lower foothills of the central plain of the Xiangkhoang Plateau. The jars are arranged in clusters ranging in number from one to several hundred.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

19.43111, 103.15250per Wikidata