History, Culture, Situation
This website focuses on working and living in Thailand, so the history part is put into this context here. There are reams of scholarly works on the history of Thailand, but this website must streamline it for modern purposes.
Thailand is an unusual country in the region in several ways, including these two:
It is the only country in the region which was never colonized by a western power.
It does not suffer from internal ethnic conflict because it is a relatively homogenous people with a single language, which is very remarkable given its size of approximately 1800 km x 800 km. (It was much larger before, but the British and French colonies surrounding it seized huge chunks along its borders.) (The political conflicts are mainly with the very poor bloc of voters and political elites, long story, but are not ethnic conflicts.)
The Thai language spills over into Laos and southern China. The Lao language is very close to Thai, both written and spoken.
The Thai people claim to trace their history to a Tai race who emigrated from an area in southern China in waves starting around 1200 years ago, and there is a lot of evidence of their paths of migrations and influences on local cities and the power structure. However, the region was already entrenched with the remnants of longreaching Indian and Sri Lankan states and influence in the ancient Dvaravati culture going back roughly 2000 years, followed by various kingdoms of Mon, Lanna, and Khmer cultures, the latter headquartered in Angkor Wat, and leaving many engineering feats behind upon its collapse.
The Thai state was established in 1238 in Sukhothai (now a city and province in north central Thailand). Its peak was under the brilliant King Ramkhamhaeng, who expanded Thai institutions and standardized the modern Thai alphabet, reducing the de facto written language from about 76 to 44 characters.
The Thai nation expanded over the next few centuries. The modern Thai nation consists chiefly of the merge between Sukhothai and two rival but ethnically close kingdoms, the economically dominant one centered at the ancient trading center of Ayuthaya just about an hour up the river from Bangkok, and the Lanna kingdom centered around Chiang Mai in the mountainous northwestern part of Thailand.
The capital of Thailand became Ayuthaya for a few hundred years. Ayuthaya was also a major trading center in southeast Asia, and in fact a city with one of the largest populations in the world at the time, with some estimates exceeding a million people. It was known as a very cosmopolitan place, and even the royal court was known for its absorption of foreign advisers and positions of influence, including westerners.
That came to an end when a large Burmese army waged a series of attacks in the 1750s and 1760s, eventually surrounded the city to cut it off from the outside world, and finally invaded, looted its valuables, damaged its structures, and burned the city to the ground before taking its loot back to Burma. The carnage was awesome, and the city remained abandoned immediately afterwards. The sheer destruction was longreaching.
Bangkok was a downstream customs post at the time, but the new line of kings turned it into the new capital city with better defenses in 1769. Being located near the mouth of the river, it could try to pick up where Ayuthaya left off to some degree, as best it could.
So that brings us to the late 1700s, around the same time as the independence of the United States of America and the French Revolution.
The new series of kings welcomed immigrants to Thailand, a huge percentage of whom were Chinese, which helped rebuild the economy.
The Thais have long been known as a hospitable culture which peacefully absorbs foreign ideas and people, unlike many other countries whose resistance to foreigners led to rifts and conflicts. You can still see these traits to this day, but 200 years ago it made a subtle but huge difference in the success of the nation.
The 1800s were a period of continued western colonization of southeast Asia, which saw Burma and Malaya come under British control, and Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos fall to the French. Laos was particular problematic because the Lao people are very close to the Thais and Laos had been under Thai influence.
King Rama 4 (1804-1868) and King Rama 5 (-1910) kept the western powers at bay by careful diplomacy and modernization, but also by ceding huge tracts of land to the British and the French. Thailand established as close a relationship with the United States as it could, to be an ally against the colonial powers.
King Rama 5, the modernizer, ascended to the throne at the age of 18 in when his astronomer father, King Rama 4, died of malaria after calculating and boating out to observe an eclipse of the Sun. The reforms and modernizations of King Rama 5 were the most extensive. You will see many portraits of King Rama 5 in Thailand. He traveled the world, abolished slavery in Thailand, and led many cultural and institutional developments.
A treaty with the British in 1909 to formalize the borders gave Thailand control of its southernmost provinces which had previously been part of the Malay kingdom, and is the root of secessionist conflict in southern Thailand to this day. However, on the eastern border with Laos and Cambodia, Thailand ceded vast tracts of territory to the French, especially to Laos.
In 1932, modernizing forces pushing for democracy resulted in the creation of a constitutional monarchy, making Thailand one of the first democratic countries in Asia. However, this began a seesaw battle between military and civilian governments which has flip-flopped countless times thru 2007.
After World War 2 broke out in Europe, the Thais took advantage of the situation to militarily regain the territories they had lost to the French and the British. Later, Japan entered the war by bombing Pearl Harbor and immediately attacking countries in Asia in their own colonial efforts, including Thailand the day after Pearl Harbor.
After fighting the Japanese for just 8 hours, the Thai military commander saw the hopelessness of it and entered an armistice with the Japanese. This essentially allowed the Japanese to use Thailand as a base and to gain free passage to attack the surrounding colonies, which allowing Thailand to stay autonomous on paper. Thailand was required to declare war on Japan's adversaries, but the Thai ambassador to the USA secretly never delivered the declaration, something overlooked by the Japanese.
The Japanese and the Thais never had a trusting relationship, and the Seri Thai (Free Thai) movement was widespread, and supported by the United States in various ways. Fortunately, Thailand was able to avoid most of the fighting during the World War. The main exception was the famous Death Railway, the effort to build a railroad from the Gulf of Thailand into Burma thru Kanchanaburi, in which vast numbers of Asian laborers died as well as many British, Australian, American, and other Allied prisoners of war.
After the Japanese lost the war, the British and French tried to gain the upper hand over Thailand based on Thailand being a formal ally of Japan, but the Americans stepped in and an agreement was made whereby Thailand would just give up the land it had taken from the British and the French so that the borders returned to what they were before World War 2.
With the rise of Communism, the United States and Thailand became close allies.
During the Vietnam War (also known as The American War in Vietnam and some other places), Thailand allowed the United States to create major air bases along its eastern border for attacks of North Vietnamese targets, as well as major logistics centers inland. However, the war was not entirely popular, and after the Americans withdrew from Vietnam, and its subsequent fall, there was tremendous pressure for the Thai government to terminate air base agreements with the Americans, whereby American military presence fell dramatically.
However, during this time, some Communist sympathizing groups arose in Thailand in the 1960s, and continued until sometime in the 1980s, at about the same time most everybody in the world had become disillusioned with Communism.
Thailand had maintained a close relationship with the United States for about 150 years, and Thai people also followed American culture like so many others in the world, so there was never any major anti-American sentiment.
After the end of the era of western colonization in the 1950s and 1960s, Thais also warmed up to other westerners.
As a free market economy all that time, western companies and western people became well established in Thailand, and this established the basis for the modern Thai economy.
From 1987 to 1996, Thailand's economy was one of the fastest growing in the world. However, vast overbuilding of office highrise buildings and speculation in the real estate market led to a severe liquidity problem in the Thai banking system, and Thailand took down Asia in the Asia Economic Crash of 1997, as discussed elsewhere on this website.
Within about 5 years, the economy had recovered and was chugging along again.
In the year 2000, a new party founded by the richest businessman in Thailand, Dr. Thaksin Shinawatra, won the most seats of Parliament in an election based on a populist platform. After barely surviving a corruption court case, "Thaksin" (as he's usually referred to) became Prime Minister, and indeed the first Prime Minister to serve a full term in office. His party became the first to win an absolute majority in the subsequent election of 2004 with a whopping 75% of the seats in parliament, gaining support from both the poor masses and also much of the educated and business elite.
Things started to unravel from there as Thaksin and his party were repeatedly accused of using their majority to erode the checks and balances political system. Tha