Leading royalist leader of the Pathet Lao. Related to the royal branch of Luang Prabang, he was a half-brother to Prince Phetxarāt and Suvanna Phūmā. He undertook his primary and secondary studies in Hanoi between 1921 and 1931, where he graduated from the Lycée Albert Sarraut. He then travelled to France to study at the Lycée Saint Louis. In 1934, he entered the prestigious École nationale des ponts et chaussées from which he graduated in 1937 as a civil engineer. After completing several internships in France, he returned to Indochina and in 1938 joined the Administration des travaux publics d’Indochine. He worked as an engineer in Nha Trang, Muong Phin, and Vinh into the early 1940s. In 1943, he published an article in the Vichy cultural magazine, Indochine (no. 133, 18 March 1943) in which he praised the national revolution let loose by Vichy during World War II. Fluent in Vietnamese, he married a Vietnamese woman from Nha Trang during his work there, Nguyen Thi Ky Nam (Vieng Kham was her adopted Lao name).
Following the defeat of the Japanese in August 1945, his older half-brother, Prince Phetxarāt, cabled to ask him to return to Laos immediately to take part in the making of a postcolonial Laos. Viet Minh representatives contacted him at about the same time and invited him to Hanoi to visit Ho Chi Minh to discuss similar things. Suphānuvong travelled to Hanoi by car from Hue in the company of Le Van Hien, future minister of Finances in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and later ambassador to Laos. After a brief meeting with Ho Chi Minh and others in Hanoi, Suphānuvong returned to Laos and began creating anti-colonialist committees in Thakhek and Savannakhet. He joined the Lao Issara government in October 1945, serving as foreign minister.
From the outset, he worked closely with DRV representatives active among the overseas Vietnamese in northeast Thailand. Together they organized the defence of Thakhek against the return of French forces in March 1946. The Prince was injured while escaping to Thailand across the Mekong. A young soldier, Le Thieu Huy,[1] threw himself over the prince to protect him from gunfire; the young Vietnamese man died in Suphānuvong’s arms. Suphānuvong continued to serve as minister of Foreign Affairs in the Lao Issara government-in-exile and was commander-in-chief of Lao Issara troops from December 1946. He became general secretary of the short-lived South East Asia League upon its creation in September 1947. In 1948 and 1949, he commanded troops positioned along the northern Thai–Lao–Burmese border.
However, working relations between the independent-minded prince and the Lao Issara leadership turned from bad to worse as the French stepped up the pressure to reach a deal putting an end to their dissidence. On 16 May 1949, the Lao Issara relieved Suphānuvong of his functions as minister of Foreign Affairs and of Defence. When the Franco-Lao Treaty of 1949 gave birth to the Associated State of Laos and the dissolution of the Lao Issara, Suphānuvong refused to return to Laos. Instead he intensified his reliance on DRV delegates in Thailand. In late 1949, he travelled to northern Vietnam on the invitation of Ho Chi Minh to build a new Lao revolutionary government in collaboration with the Vietnamese. In August 1950, he helped create the Lao Resistance Government and the Pathet Lao nationalist front. When Prince Phetxarāt refused to serve as president, Suphānuvong became the chief of the new resistance government. In 1953, as the DRV’s divisions occupied large swaths of eastern Laos, Suphānuvong returned to Laos from Vietnam to run the “resistance government”.
Suphānuvong was one of the DRV’s closest Lao collaborators during the entire Indochina War, third only to Kaisôn Phomvihān and Nūhak Phūmsavan. The Vietnamese called him Chinh and Cu, meaning venerable one. The communist leadership of Laos has recently unveiled a monument in Luang Prabang in honor of the “Red Prince”. See also ASSOCIATED STATES OF INDOCHINA; METIS; PARTY AFFAIRS COMMITTEE.
[1]. Le Thieu Huy, educated in France, was the son of the interwar Vietnamese intellectual, politician, and journalist, Le Thuoc.