Word: savang
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DURING ten years abroad for TIME, Hong Kong Bureau Chief Stanley Karnow has done the basic reporting for cover stories all over the globe (most recently: Ferhat Abbas, Liu Shao-chi, Robert Menzies, Hong Kong). He rates his latest - this week's biography of Laos' King Savang Vatthana and his beleaguered country - as "undoubtedly the most difficult." The task, says Karnow, was "to create literary order out of an anarchy of anthropological detail, history and legend, incongruous economics, fanciful military information, and political developments that are really complex regional and family rivalries. Trying to put Laos into intelligible...
Presiding over all three is King Savang Vatthana, who towers above most of his subjects at 5 ft. 8 in. Savang Vatthana is recognized by all Laotians and both Russia and the U.S. as the chief of state...
Puritanical Heir. Savang Vatthana was plucked away from home at the age of ten. He attended a lycée in Montpellier, got a degree from Paris' Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, where French diplomats were trained. After a decade, Savang Vatthana returned home both flattered and baffled by the experience. He no longer could speak Lao, and had to be instructed by a palace functionary for years...
...Savang Vatthana, a rather puritanical fellow, found himself at sharp odds with his father. King Sisavang Vong, who considered polygamy a foundation stone of the Laotian way of life. Once a year it was his father's royal pleasure to take a leisurely 40-day boat ride down the Mekong to Vientiane, picking and choosing from the new crop of maidens in the villages as he passed. The palace swarmed with royalty who were all half or full brothers and sisters of the future King...
Just about everybody else had offered an idea for ending the civil war in Laos. Last week the most peaceable man around, King Savang Vatthana, had his try. Clad in a gold-buttoned tunic, grey pantaloons and black silk stockings, the King plucked a pink folder from atop a silver urn proffered by a kneeling courtier. In cadenced, elegant French, he read a message to "the countries of the world." Laos, he declared, was "a peaceful country, which for more than 20 years has known neither peace nor security." Savang Vatthana promised to refrain from any military alliance...