Postage stamps and postal history of Laos Postage stamps and postal history of Laos This is a survey of the postage stamps and postal history of Laos. Laos is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, bordered by Burma and People's Republic of China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the south and Thailand to the west. Laos traces its history to the Kingdom of Lan Xang or "Land of a Million Elephants", which existed from the 14th to the 18th century. After a period as a French protectorate, Laos gained independence in 1953. A long civil war ended officially when the Communist Pathet Lao
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