Thai History and Contemporary Politics
Thai culture emerged and evolved gradually in ancient times.
From great antiquity until about 800 CE, ideas about religion and politics flowed outward with trade and commerce from India for thousands of miles across both continental and maritime Southeast Asia. Hinduism and Buddhism (after 500 BCE) as well as Indian art, music, and philosophy knitted a huge Indosphere together culturally.
In India, Budddhism was a popular religious and cultural innovation in the first millennium BCE because of its aspirational goal of individual moral and religious development. Unlike Hinduism with its castes and priestly Brahmins, Buddhism encouraged everyone to seek enlightenment and a moral life equally, without intercession by higher classes.
The great emperor Ashoka was the first to unify India under a single political system, in about 300 BCE. He was devoutly Buddhist and promoted Buddhism as a state religion throughout the subcontinent. Ashoka’s monks spread Buddhism to the island of Sri Lanka, off the southern tip of the Indian Peninsula.
As centuries passed, Buddhism in India became more and more ritualistic and its emphasis shifted toward a pantheon of semi-divine bodhisattvas. In other words, Buddhism evolved to be more and more like the ground of Hinduism from which it sprang.
Theravada Buddhism, which eschewed the Hindu-like pantheon reasserting itself in India, spread from Sri Lanka across Southeast Asia, both by land and by sea. Theravada Buddhism emphasizes the life and humanity of Gautama Siddhartha rather than his divine nature or the many semi-divine beings in Mahayana Buddhism which spread from India to China, Japan, and Korea in the first millennium CE.
Throughout Southeast Asia, cultural groupings emerged whose influence spread outward like mandalas. Political and cultural influence was strongest in the center. Further out, villages paid tribute to the central power in exchange for protection, but allegiance to the center waned with increasing distance. At the periphery of one mandala the distant influence of one center competed with the distant influence of another.
The largest and most powerful cultural/political mandalas were those which grew up on large flat plains and river deltas whose abundant water made possible agricultural surpluses based on rice cultivation. Mountain peoples were sparse while valley and river delta peoples became populous and influential.
The Angkor (Khmer) empire arose about 800 CE and dominated the region until about 1100 CE. The Khmer people were very wealthy and powerful. Their empire stretched from modern Burma to modern Cambodia, fed by intensive rice cultivation in verdant river valleys and by gold which they traded with India. Angkor Wat was built during this time and remains the largest religious structure of any kind in the world today. By this time, Buddhism was a spent force in India and Angkor became the world center of Theravada Buddhism. Tai people from mountain north migrated southward into the Chao Phraya Delta where they adopted the Angkor culture.
The glory of Angkor faded around 1100 CE. The Thai people founded the Kingdom of Sukkothai about this time, which lasted until about 1350 when it was succeeded by Ayutthaya. As explained above, Ayutthaya was a prosperous state through 30 kings and 5 dynasties from 1351 to 1767 when it was destroyed by a Burmese army. In the Early Modern period when Europeans first encountered Asian cultures, the city of Ayutthaya had a population of over 1 million people. This was at a time when London and Paris had only about 50,000 inhabitants.
After burning the city to the ground and destroying the Thai state in 1867, the Burmese army withdrew and did not occupy the land. The Thai people moved their capital to newly-founded Bangkok. The destruction of Ayutthaya was a national trauma. The people saw their defeat as a moral lesson to avoid division and court intrigue, and to seek modernization of their technology, their military, and their political structure.
Many people are familiar with the fourth king of the modern dynasty, Rama IV. He is a major character in the western drama “Anna and the King of Siam,” played by Yul Brynner in the film “The King and I.” That story was written by Anna and greatly exaggerates her role in Thai history.
Rama IV is revered by modern Thais as a clever modernizer and diplomatic strategist. He ruled Siam from the 1830s to 1860s and skillfully played French and English colonizers against one another through careful diplomacy. Under his rule, Siam adopted western technology and administrative structures. His efforts were so successful that Siam (now Thailand) remained independent and was in fact never colonized even as all the surrounding countries fell to the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, English, and French!
Thailand’s current government is a “constitutional monarchy “ in which King Rama X has cultural but not political authority. The present constitution was essentially written by a military junta following a coup in 2014, severely limiting the power of elected officials. The Prime Minister since 2014 was the leader of the coup that place him in power. Parliament is divided into two houses. The Senate is appointed by the Executive rather than elected. The Lower house is elected but can easily be dissolved by the Prime Minister.
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