Isaan - Northeast Thailand historical timeline

Isaan has been settled for longer than almost anywhere in Southeast Asia, and its history belongs as much to Laos and Cambodia as to Thailand.

Ban Chiang

Excavations at Ban Chiang from the 1960s and 1970s uncovered a farming and metalworking culture with burials dating back some four thousand years, producing distinctive red-on-buff painted pottery and bronze tools. The findings forced a reassessment of when and where bronze technology developed in the region, and the site is UNESCO-listed.

The Khmer centuries

From around the tenth century the plateau lay within the Khmer empire, connected to Angkor by a royal road with rest houses and hospitals along it. Phimai and Phanom Rung were major sanctuaries, and the reservoirs and causeways built then still shape the landscape. Phimai’s plan and its white sandstone may have influenced Angkor Wat rather than the other way around.

Lan Xang and the Lao

As Khmer power receded, the plateau came under the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang and then its successor states, and large-scale Lao settlement gave the region the language and culture it still has. The That Phanom stupa on the Mekong is the great religious monument of that world.

Absorption into Siam

Bangkok extended control through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often by forcibly resettling populations westward across the river. The Franco-Siamese treaty of 1893 fixed the Mekong as the boundary, dividing the Lao cultural area between French Laos and Siam, and a policy of Thai-ification followed — the Isaan language was discouraged in schools well into the twentieth century.

The Cold War

American airbases at Udon Thani, Ubon Ratchathani, Nakhon Phanom and Korat operated through the Vietnam War, bringing roads, money and a lasting mark on several cities, and the region saw a communist insurgency into the 1980s.