Rosewood Luang Prabang | THE BEST HOTELS IN ASIA: THE GOLD LIST 2020 | Conde Nast Traveller

Legend has it that on his pilgrimage across Asia, the Buddha stopped to rest where the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers merge, in the middle of what we now know as Luang Prabang. He prophesied that a rich and powerful metropolis would rise along these somnolent, muddy banks. Though that apex only lasted from the 14th century to the 16th, this Kingdom of a Million Elephants lived on for architect Bill Bensley, who celebrated its swashbuckling foreign explorers and ornately garbed pachyderms at Rosewood’s low-slung riverside retreat on the sleepy periphery of this Laotian temple town. Minimalist it is not....