Читать книгу Thailand Tuttle Travel Pack - Jim Algie - Страница 8

Thailand Overview

Thais refer to the country’s shape as an “axe”, the long handle formed by the Kra Isthmus with the Gulf of Thailand on one side and the Andaman Sea on the other. On the western flank is Myanmar, with Cambodia and Laos to the east. The head of the axe is serrated by the mountains of the “Golden Triangle” where Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar merge.

Occupying a total of 514,000 square kilometers, Thailand is twice the size of England. It has six regions. The mountainous highlands of the north are home to many of the country’s hilltribe minorities. This region is irrigated by the Wang, Ping, Yom and Nan Rivers, which are tributaries of the mighty, long Chao Phaya River that also bisects Bangkok.

In the northeast is the Khorat Plateau of deciduous and evergreen forests. The central plains, known as the country’s “rice bowl”, are endowed with fecund farmlands. And extending into Cambodia are the South east Uplands that consist of moist evergreen forest. In contrast, the Tenasserim Hills, covered with semi-evergreen forests at higher altitudes, run alongside the border with Burma all the way down to the Kra Isthmus in the south.

In the multi-millennium-spanning epic that is Thai history, many ethnic groups—the Tai, Mons, Khmers, Indians and Europeans—have all contributed substantial chapters to this ongoing saga. From Southern China came the Tai people around AD 1100. From the Mons and Khmers came major advancements in language, art and architecture. From India came Buddhism. And from the Chinese immigrants came commercial acumen and family-first values.

The arrival of Buddhist missionaries from India around the second or third century BC is nebulous. More certain is that Buddhism began to spread during the Dvaravati period (6th–13th centuries AD), a loose configuration of city-states.

As in most of Southeast Asia, Theravada Buddhism is the kingdom’s main form of spiritual solace (though it’s been influenced by so many different strains of Brahmanism, Hinduism, shamanism and animism that it’s almost a religion unto itself). Theravadan Buddhists pride themselves on a fundamentalist interpretation of the canon. Many of the loan words from Sanskrit and Pali, which defined the Buddhist scriptures, then became the linguistic roots of the tonal Thai tongue.

Smaller groups of Christians, Hindus, Taoists, Sikhs and Muslims coexist in relative peace except for the three southern provinces abutting Malaysia (Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat) where a spate of bombings and beheadings has left a trail of murder and carnage since 2004.

One major reason why Thailand, alone in all of Indochina, managed to stave off colonization by European powers is that the country is so adept at adopting and assimilating foreign cultures. Since the Ayutthaya period (1351–1767), when foreign traders, missionaries and desperados first descended en masse in the 15th and 16th centuries, the country has displayed a famously tolerant attitude towards other nationalities, which has benefited tourism greatly and changed very little over the centuries.

Arguably no single person has had more of an impact on contemporary Thailand than King Rama V, who reigned from 1868 to 1910. In the late 19th century when he became the first Siamese monarch to visit Europe, he brought back with him a taste for Western-style suits, cigars and bowler hats, along with ideas to modernize the country by building roads and hospitals and abolishing slavery. His former palace, the Wimanmek Mansion, shows a willingness to counterpoint Western styles with Siamese iconography: the upholstered chairs in the world’s largest golden teakwood mansion are ornamented with the gilded heads of the “serpent king” of Buddhist lore.

Contemporary Thai pop culture is as globalized, materialistic and mall-spawned as anywhere else in the developed world, with the influences of Korean and British pop, Japanese manga, and Hollywood and MTV hip-hop largely ensuring that classical Thai culture (the dances, masked dramas and trebly orchestras) plays second fiddle and is largely relegated to providing tourist entertainment and sporadic shows in the bigger urban areas like Bangkok.

But the portraits of King Rama V, which predominate in homes, offices, nightclubs, restaurants and even massage parlors, which are still worshipped as totems of the monarch who became a messiah from beyond the grave, go to show that beneath the globalized façade is a very Thai soul.