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I was full of questions about the Hmong that I hoped Khan could answer, but he couldn’t. He turned out to be less than expert in his Local Knowledge. For example, within sight of the largest collection of jars is a ruined and abandoned temple. It is a tower made of blocks of laterite, wide at the base, but redented as it rises toward the pointed crown, with each step almost completely covered by who knows how many generations of unchecked plant growth. It certainly looks like the simplest type of Khmer chapel, but in what’s now Laos, the Khmer culture didn’t penetrate farther north than Vientiane. Was this, rather, what’s known as a prang in Thailand, where Khmer ruins are conspicuous in many regions, and, what’s more, left their design influence on Thai Buddhism? Khan seemed to lack even the broadest historical understanding of who was where and when. Maybe the lesson to be gleaned from his deficiencies as a comprador is an awareness that today’s national borders are political, not cultural; that belief systems were passed back and forth, mutating as they did so; and that the French, for better or for worse — and, in some ways, obviously both — were a unifying and codifying cultural force and not merely money-grubbing power-grabbers, though, like all the European colonial powers, they certainly were that, as well.

Khan may have been unable to impart much knowledge even about the abundant Hmong, but he did lead us into their front garden, so to speak. The Hmong are one of the important ethnic minorities of Laos and Thailand. They dislike being called mercenaries, but using a softer term is as much a matter of tact as of accuracy. During the eight years when the U.S. waged a secret war in Laos, using Hmong tribesmen, sometimes in battalion-sized units, to fight the Pathet Lao, the most intense violence took place where we were going now.

We drove to the summit of one of the nearby hills. This was as far as we could travel in Khan’s vehicle as beyond that the road had become a mere muddy rut. We then continued on foot, over meadows with stunted conifers, and, way off in the background, the mountains of Vietnam (Dien Bien Phu is about 125 kilometres away). This description makes it sound pleasant enough, and viewed in broad perspective at the right time of the year it is indeed scenic. But the spot formerly called la Plaine des Jarres must be one of Southeast Asia’s spookiest places, a large, flat region, surrounded by mountains as high as three thousand metres and never completely free of disfiguring mist. The stone jars that litter the site (it’s a marvel that so many survived the bombing, even in pieces) are thought to have been made two thousand years ago, around the time the Hmong first migrated southward from Mongolia, a place of origin that can still be read in their faces. But the ancestors of the Hmong did not produce these jars. In fact, specialists tell us, they bear no discernible trace of the Tibetan, Chinese, Khmer, Indian, Viet, or Cham cultures, though virtually all of these people fought battles on the spot over the centuries.

Each jar is carved from a single rock or boulder, most of them limestone, but some are granite. The jars vary in size according to the size of the raw material. At the biggest of the several clusters scattered over the meadows, the largest jar is 2.5 metres high and quite wide (I could have stood up in it), but most are a great deal smaller. Some have stone covers.

Many theories have been advanced about their use. Some speculate that they were for collecting water during the dry season; others argue that they were for storing rice for use during times of famine, or even for fermenting it. Still others hold that they were intended for votive or funereal purposes. An anthropologist in the 1930s claimed to have found human bones in some of the jars, but this evidence and other artifacts have been lost. French photographs from the early twentieth century show figurative carvings on at least a couple of jars, but these features, too, were destroyed long ago. Now there’s only one lichen-covered jar that is said to have a sort of petroglyph of a human figure. Seeing the image, however, requires a great deal of faith and imagination. In any case, most of the field work and scholarly writing on the subject, until recent times especially, had been done by the French, who had patiently labelled, documented and studied each specimen. A disproportionate amount of the labour was the initiative of the admirable Ecole Française D’Extrême-Orient (representing the positive side of French colonialism). Madeleine Colani, a famous archaeologist, was one of the great figures in the field. Her book Megalithes du Haut Laos, published in 1935, is the seminal work, and I deeply regret not having bought the mildewed copy I once found in a box of junk under a rickety table at a hole-in-the-wall second-hand bookshop in Saigon (where I also spotted copies of the Associated Press Year Book and related items no doubt left behind hurriedly during the dramatic climax of the American War).

Odd to say, but the main Plain of Jars site smells like England. Close up, it feels and looks somewhat like England, too. There’s flint underfoot. Rounded green hills recall the Cotswolds. But when you look further and more closely, you see strange contradictions. The lookalike Cotswolds are backed up by a lookalike Swiss Alpine slopes and the whole scene is plopped down in the middle of the mountain rainforest that covers much of Southeast Asia. There’s a weird combination of flora: a few cacti, and trees that are close cousins of the Ponderosa pine, but also gum trees of the sort found in tropical Australia. The area seems pieced together using leftover bits from other climatic zones.

Such is the landscape today. Speculating about the landscape and climate two millennia ago is of course difficult at best and possibly foolhardy. At this particular location there has been relatively little development; and while the climatic cycle may have changed, the basic fact of alternating wet and dry seasons probably has not. As there is no river or other year-round source of water close by, it may well be that the jars, or some of them, were used to store up water during the monsoon. The design of the surviving lids, which have circular runnels for channelling rainwater, points to this. So does the fact that even today many Lao in this part of the country have primitive hand-dug wells. The very shape of the vessels, with walls of a uniform thickness and exterior sides straight rather than curved, is ideal for keeping evaporation to a minimum. My feeling, one supported by absolutely no one else as far as I know, is that all the labour involved in making such containers points to a highly valuable crop, probably one requiring all the more help during the dry season because it’s one that matures only once a year. And I think we can guess what it might have been. When I visited the Plain of Jars, the local Hmong had finished the annual harvest of opium poppies only ninety days earlier, before the rains began.

The time before the rains was not always an easy abstraction to keep in mind when M and I were there, given the intensity of the sporadic downpours and their cumulative effect on the roads. On our way back from the site, we had to take shelter in a tall, narrow cave with three chimneys at the top that permitted narrow shafts of light to reach the floor, where several small Buddhist shrines had been erected. A nearby resident told us that during the American War, local people fled to this cave and one other whenever bombing raids began. Then the caves were themselves bombed. The number of people killed is a matter of dispute, to judge from the fact that everyone I asked had a different figure. But the locals swear that as late as the 1980s, a decade and a half after the incident, visitors still smelled the faint odour of dead bodies inside the cave.

Red mud, the sort familiar to readers of the memoirs that war has produced, kept us from driving to the second jars site, about twelve kilometres distant. But we got as close we could, and then hiked the rest of the way. So much heavy mud stuck to our shoes that I felt like an old-time deep-sea diver walking the ocean floor in leaden boots. My trousers were filthy, too. I considered rolling them up to the knee but had been told this was an open invitation to leeches. The mess would soon be worse: cross dark clouds seemed to be holding a council overhead.

This second site is higher up, smaller and more compact than the first, but no better preserved. Though a great many lie in pieces, the jars are found around the rims of craters. And yet on the same site I saw something that lifted my spirits. I found one ugly crater with a mature tree growing in it. Then I saw another. More than thirty years have passed and time has pushed on. At some level a new generation has forgotten the horror. Nature, it seems, is forgetting, too.

As for the Hmong, 3 million of them live in China and more than half a million in Vietnam. The lesser numbers elsewhere in Southeast Asia, including Burma, have never been counted accurately. All Hmong share a common language, but they are distinguished from one another by the dominant colours on their jackets and headdresses. Blue Hmong and White Hmong are numerous in Vietnam, for example. Those in Laos and Thailand are known as Green Hmong and can be divided further by their palette, and more importantly, by their politics.

Vietnam’s Hmong sided with the communists in the early 1960s, while those in Laos were recruited by the CIA. All had fearsome reputations as combatants. The anti-communist ones were officially paid by the rightist Lao government, but the money came from the United States, which also armed and trained them. When the military effort failed, thousands of Hmong fighters, rightly fearing for their lives, fled to the United States. As a result, the largest Hmong population outside Asia, about fifty-eight thousand people, is in Fresno, California, with several smaller enclaves elsewhere in the state. Minneapolis, of all places, has the highest concentration outside the west coast. In recent years, more and more have been allowed to immigrate to the United States.

The Hmong in Laos — the ones who take such exception to being lumped in with their relatives and friends who worked for the CIA — are hill people, like nearly all Asian Hmong, and generally keep to elevations above eight hundred metres — far above, if they can. They live by growing maize and sometimes opium by slash-and-burn methods, and by hunting. Every year on the Plain of Jars, Hmong are injured, maimed, or killed by UXO — unexploded ordnance — once dropped from American B-52s. The most common and deadliest of these leftovers are the fist-sized sachets of explosive once used in cluster bombs. Hmong hunters seek them out for the gunpowder they contain. Foreigners visiting the area are advised to stick closely to the narrow footpaths and hire a Hmong to lead the way, and then follow in the prints of his or her flip-flops.