There are other protections as well. Since 1995, when UNESCO inscribed Luang Prabang on its list of World Cultural Heritage sites, designating it “the best-preserved city in Southeast Asia,” teams of architects and planners, mostly French, have labored to hold back the inevitable tide of development, retarding if not altogether halting the changes that often spell doom when some lovely and untouched backwater becomes the next destination. And Luang Prabang is surely that place. The rate and the scale of development throughout Southeast Asia over the past several decades would induce melancholy in anyone whose good fortune it was to have visited Hanoi, say, when that city at nightfall was still mostly lighted by cook fires in charcoal braziers; or Phnom Penh when there were still more bicycles than cars; or Siem Reap before resorts were thrown up willy-nilly alongside the former killing fields.