On September 17, 2026, officials in Luang Prabang, one of Laos’s best-known tourist cities, met to deal with a rather unusual problem: souvenir shops.
Authorities said they had inspected 15 premises suspected of involvement in illegal wildlife-product sales, closed two shops and detained foreign suspects. They also moved against businesses that admitted only selected foreign tour groups, calling for legal shops to be accessible to ordinary customers and for tighter scrutiny of businesses linked to so-called “zero-yuan” or “zero-dollar” tours.
But trace the story backward, and it leads to a wonderfully strange clue: a reporter walked up to a place called a coffee shop and was told there was no coffee.