The Ancient City of Shrestrapura is the earliest known and studied example of urban planning in Southeast Asia and has great potential to yield tremendous information about the rise of urbanism in the region and about daily life in the formative period of the Khmer Empire.

Preserving Vat Phou and the Champasak cultural landscape is a big task, even a monumental task. To make that task easier, it has been broken down into more manageable projects that can be accomplished one at a time, as funding permits. That's where the Vat Phou Fund comes in. The Fund funds projects. Each project completed gets us closer to the goal of preserving Champasak's heritage.

The Champasak Heritage Management Plan identifies a number of projects critical to the preservation and development of the site success. The Vat Phou Fund will provide the funding for some of them. These projects range in scope from site improvements and visitor enhancements to employee training and range in cost from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. Funding for larger scale projects such as the stabilization or restoration of standing structures, which will cost in the millions of dollars, will be sought under different means, primarily through inter-governmental cooperative agreements. UNESCO will be involved in procuring funds for those projects as well, which will complement the UNESCO-Laotion International Project for the Safeguarding of Vat Phou.

Projects for which funding is currently being sought are listed below. If you are interested in underwriting the complete cost of a particular project, please contact us.