Treasures From Laos
By: M. Derepas, P. Gay
Year: 1997
If you're looking for old historical photos of Laos, this is your book. I absolutely love going through this. It's a brilliant compilation of old black and white photos, drawings, and engravings from the mid-to-late 1800s onwards. Along with other random images such as an old map drawing from 1686. It's essentially a photographic documentary of life and people in Laos, or as it was called then The Kingdom of Lan Xang.
The French did one thing well when they went to Laos and that was to document and photograph the people and scenery so a lot of these photographs are no doubt originally sourced from them. Overall, it's quite interesting to see how things were in Laos then.
This book was the result of cooperation between the Lao Ministry of Information and Culture's Institut de Recherches sur la Culture Lao and also the Association Culturelle des Routes de la Soie. If you're lucky, you may still find copies for sale in Vientiane for around $30-50USD.
(P.S. Our apologies, the image above doesn't do this book justice. But if you're curious, it's an elephant convoy in 1897.)
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