The Plain of Jars is a plateau of grassland in Xieng Khouang province, in northern Laos, where more than 2,100 stone jars stand in the grass and under the trees, set here three thousand years ago by people who left no writing, hollowed from sandstone and granite in sizes up to three metres and tipped and cracked over the centuries, and it is walked at the open field of Site 1 in the morning fog and in the wooded jar groves of the hills beyond. The jars were most likely for the dead, since burials and cremated bone were found around them, and the Lao stories explained them long before any archaeologist, as the drinking cups of a giant king, Khun Cheuang, who brewed rice wine in them to celebrate a victory; more than ninety jar fields are recorded across the province, and only seven are open, because between 1964 and 1973 some 270 million cluster bomblets fell on Laos and the plateau took the worst of it, so the paths at each site are marked by the clearance teams. Almost every jar stands open to the sky, but a handful still carry a thick stone disc across the rim, the clearest hint of how they were meant to be closed.
Site 1 near the town of Phonsavan is the open field, and on cold clear nights the plateau at 1,100 metres sheds its heat so that at dawn fog fills the hollows and the jars surface one by one as it burns off. Sites 2 and 3 are in the hills, jars sitting in the shade under trees ankle-deep in dry leaves and blotched with pale lichen, reached across paddies that turn gold in October and November, and Site 52 at Ban Phakeo holds 392 jars, more than anywhere, scattered down a forested ridge among the rocks and pines on a hike from the road. The Plain of Jars is a cemetery nobody can read, and the war left its own scars between the stones.