Which country's old royal capital was Luang Prabang?

Laos, and the town is a UNESCO site of Buddhist monasteries and French colonial buildings on a peninsula between two rivers. It was the royal capital until the monarchy was abolished in 1975, when the last king was sent to a re-education camp and died there.

Laos also has a distinction nobody would want: it is the most heavily bombed country per head in history. Between 1964 and 1973 the United States dropped over two million tonnes of ordnance on it in a campaign that was not declared and was denied at the time - roughly a planeload every eight minutes for nine years, aimed at supply routes running through a country that was not officially at war.

Around a third of it did not explode. Unexploded cluster submunitions - locally called bombies - still kill and maim people, disproportionately children and farmers, fifty years later, and clearance is slow and expensive work. The country is landlocked, mountainous and poor, and its main development strategy has been damming the Mekong for hydroelectricity to sell to its neighbours, which brings its own arguments with everyone downstream.