What Replaced the Patron, and a Death Not Recorded

The new government did not abolish Buddhism, which would have been impossible in a country where most men had spent time in robes, and it did not leave it alone either. The sangha was reorganised under state supervision and folded into the mass organisation structure, the older hierarchy was replaced, monks were expected to teach in terms compatible with the new political order, and some practices judged wasteful or superstitious were discouraged. A considerable number of monks disrobed or left the country. Over the following decades the state moved back toward using Buddhist symbols as national ones, and the great stupa at Vientiane returned to the centre of official ceremony, so the position now is neither the old patronage nor the early hostility.

The king and members of his family were taken to a re-education camp in the north east. He died there. The government did not announce it, no date has been established, and the accounts that circulate come from former detainees and from officials speaking long afterwards and do not agree. The atlas records the death as unrecorded rather than supplying a year, because supplying one would mean choosing between testimonies that cannot at present be checked.