Geography of Laos Geography of Laos Laos is an independent republic, and a landlocked nation in Southeast Asia, northeast of Thailand, west of Vietnam. It covers 236,800 square kilometers in the center of the Southeast Asian peninsula and it is surrounded by Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, the People's Republic of China, Thailand, and Vietnam. About seventy percent of its geographic area is made up of mountain ranges, highlands, plateaux, and rivers cut through. Its location has often made it a buffer between more powerful neighboring states, as well as a crossroads for trade and communication. Migration and international conflict have contributed to the present
Eurasian (mixed ancestry) of British settlement and 49 years of American occupation which gives the country the longest unstopping 382 years of continuously European exposure in Southeast Asia. While Burma was colonized by the British for 124 years, the French controlled Indochina for 67 years, the British controlled Malaysia for 120 years and Dutch controlled Indonesia for 149 years after Portugal. In the last official census in French Indochina in 1946, there were 45,000 Europeans in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. One-fifth were Eurasian. Jean-François Izzi, a French banker of Italian origin, was the father of the Queen Mother of Cambodia, Norodom Monineath. The