Writer's Journal

The Ong people lived in Indochina lived in Indochina, sandwiched between the Khmer people of Cambodia and the Lao. The last vestiges of thier civilization was destroyed by American bombing in the 1960s. They had their own language and style of architecture.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Ong was the fact that they achieved flight in the early 1400s. While it wasn’t powered flight, it was still a monumental achievement: their airships were an early form of the dirigible. On a frame of fire-hardened bamboo, they stretched several layers of silk and paper to form an envelope that was air-tight other than several ports in the bottom.

Lift was provided by several braziers of coals, which were suspended beneath openings of the envelope, with bone and ceramic handles tied to ropes and held in place. Forward motion was provided by sails.

The Ong traded with both the kingdoms of North-eastern India and the states of southern China until the 1700s, when a civil war destroyed most of the knowledge of the construction of the airships, the last surviving craftsmen sought refuge in isolated buddhist monasteries. No new ships were created after 1762, and the last one had to be dismantled in 1770, due to normal wear-and-tear.

Over time, they lost their ethnic identity, and were subsumed into the Lao and Khmer peoples. The last records of their secrets were discovered by a Vietnamese expedition in the late 1980s; the records were incomplete, due to a Cambodian farmer using their treated manuscripts for combustible fuel.

Currently, there is one surviving codex, kept in a museum in Hanoi.