Town of Luang Prabang

Gilded temple roofs sweep low between shophouses and French colonial villas on the peninsula where the Nam Khan meets the Mekong — Luang Prabang, the old royal capital of Laos, holds one of Asia's most graceful townscapes. Saffron-robed monks file through the streets at dawn collecting alms, moving past an architecture in which Lao tradition and 19th- and 20th-century European building fused into something singular. UNESCO inscribed the town in 1995.