Thailand before the Thais.

This is a text, I've borrowed from USMTA,I wonder if they've written the documents on history themselves,but I've seen copies of the wordings in several other webpages, so I don't really know. I feel the wording has been carefully chosen, why duplicate the effort? The purpose of my blog will be to provide links (a bit too lightly coloured with this blogging template, hope you can see them) on key issues I find interesting, and maybe have chats with others who have similar interests once a while.



Thailand before the Thais: The area covered by the modern state of Thailand, known until 1939 as Siam, is one of considerable diversity. The term Thai or Siamese is therefore primarily not ethnic, but political, denoting a subject of the king of Thailand, secondarily linguistic, meaning a speaker of the Thai language, and thirdly cultural, signifying a product of the culture to which the various ethnic groups that have formerly lived or live today in the region have all contributed.



The term Tai is generally used to denote the various related peoples, among them the Shans, the Laos and the Siamese Thais, who graduallly migrated into mainland Southeast Asia from southwest China (this issue is still widely debated) and of whom the Siamese Thai branch now form the majority of the population of the kingdom of Thailand.



Trading relations between the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia go back far into the prehistoric period, but the earliest evidence of Indian influence penetrating into Southeast Asia in the wake of this trade dates from the 1st century AD with the formation in mainland Southeast Asia, the Malay peninsula and the western islands of the Indonesian archipelago of states in which, the kings in order to legitimise their power, had adopted either Hinduism or Buddhism, together with other Indian ideas of kingship, statecraft, law and administration, and forms of religious art and architecture derived from Indian models.



Among the earliest of these kingdoms was the state called Funan by the Chinese. According again to the Chinese sources, Funan was replaced as the leading power in the Mekong valley by one of its vassals, the Khmer state of Zhenla, which was centered round Bassac in southern Laos. When Funan was being threatened by the rising power of Zhenla, the dominant people of central Thailand seem to have been the Mons, an ancient people, related to the Khmers, who probably settled in the region at about the same time. While under the rule of Funan, the Mons adopted Indian religion, chiefly Theravada Buddhism. unlike the predominantly Hindu Khmers. There appear to have been numerous small Mon states in the region, of which the most important was Dvaravati. Little is known about Dvaravati, and even its name occurs only once, in an inscription that refers to the 'Lord of Dvaravati'. Many believe that it was a federation of Mon states rather than a single state, but the term is now applied to all Mon art and culture of this period in Thailand. The principal Mon-Dvaravati centers were U Thong, Lopburi, Khu Bua and Nakhon Pathom. In the north in the Lamphun area was the Mon kingdom of Haripunjaya, called Hariphunchai in Thai.



Haripunjaya is traditionally believed to have been founded in the late 7th century by a group of holy men at whose invitation the Buddhist ruler of Lop Buri sent his daughter Cham Tewi with a large retinue of Mons to Lamphun to be the first ruler of the new state. At about the time that Haripunjaya was founded, Dvaravati seems to have become politically, though not culturally, subject to the great maritime empire of Sri Vijaya, the capital of which is thought to have been at Palembang on the east coast of Sumatra and which at various times between the 7th and 13th century extended its rule over much of western Indonesia, the Malay peninsula and southern Thailand as far as the Kra Isthmus and other parts of the coast of the Gulf of Thailand.



In the early 11th century the eastern part of the Mon realm fell under Khmer rule, while the western part was conquered by the Burmese King Anawrahta of Pagan (ruled 1044 -77). Haripunjaya also fell under Khmer rule in the II century and was finally conquered at the end of the 13th by King Mangrai, ruler of the northern kingdom of Lan Na.



Finally after a serious of battles they succumbed to Khmer domination, but by early 13th century, they outnumbered the titular overlords. It was at this point that several groups united, proclaimed their freedom and in 1238, founded the independent kingdom of Sukhothai, (Dawn of happiness) in the Pali language. Under its second ruler, King Ramkhamhaeng, Sukhothai expanded its empire pushing the Khmer as far back as Malaysia and the Philippines. The kingdom of Sukhothai is remembered for its culture rather than political power. in a brief but brilliant period,it was the scene of a 'golden age' that saw the introduction of the Theravada Buddhism as the state religion, the creation of the Thai alphabet and the establishment of a paternal monarchy that made a vivid contrast to the aloof Khmer god-kings of Ankor.

Old order vs new order

If you are familiar with my blog, you'd know I have a fascination for complex and chaotic systems. How and why they function? Most importantly, how do they differ from our more familiar systems of hierarchical, fixed universe?



So far, I've noted that the commonly manifested fixed universe model have guiding principles, such as: centralized power, order from the top down, one God that rules all, clear lines of organization, each agent having a set, well-defined function, enabling division of labor, competition is necessary to demonstrate who is the strongest, efficiency is prized, parts are to be specialized and fixed in their proper places, rules and logic, orders and laws, reason and classes. Several hundred years of competition developing from fighting for survival, to warfare for domination and appropriation of resources, to competition in the arena, sports, to comparative advantages of trading nations, eventually to these merry days of world financial roulette. Oops, it looks like order is tripping over itself.



Somehow, the world is getting more and more complex, as borders become issues of conflict, circumvented by multinational national-law evaders, and dissolved by wireless communications. Those agents at the bottom of the rung aren't receiving clear messages from the top bosses anymore. They're starting to feel that they are individuals, not pieces in the machine. Rogue, free, self-serving agents popping up here and there in so many diverse forms. So the top boss reasons, how do I hit them all down at once, I have to be the boss?



The problem becomes apparent that underneath all that order, there exists other ways of doing things and suddenly they want to define themselves. Ah, but the status quo doesn't want to lose their bet in their old, so material, so well-defined structures that they can't see how it is falling apart.



This new order, paradoxically is chaotic order. Free agents forming shifting structures that pop in and out of view, gathering and dispersing in multiple locations all the time. Snowflakes, storms, chemical reactions, ants,... Well..well..well, what do you see? Even human behavior! Tragically, the first time this got noticed was 9/11. So how does the old order respond? In its old familiar way, let's give it a name, let's find a target. Well, we all know the story, there always a Michael Moore to tell us about it.



While everybody is being media-hyped forced to focus their attention on that affair, those other free agents are doing what they always do, popping up here and there in different forms, do you care to look for them? Where do you find order out of chaos? The scientists tells us, out there...on the edges, the place between the stillness of death, and complete chaos.



Me? I've been getting goosebumps and feeling my hair raise at their ends lately, because I've been noticing these edges. No, I'm not seeing ghosts. I think I'm seeing the turning of the tide. Most of the time, I want to shout out in sheer exhilaration, "At Last!!!" But of course, I can't do that, they'd think I'm crazy. You know what they do with seers and prophets. They either worship them or burn them. Brrrrrr, nope, not for me. Well, just a few leads for those who aren't completely lost by the time they've read this line: Brazil, China, India, and of course, Thailand.

Hello again

Whew, it's been such a long time that I left blogging and now Blogger has a new look. I'm actually having a good laugh at myself, rereading what I've written in my blog. How unorganized my thoughts are! And there I was,thinking all the while I was blogging that I was making perfect sense. Well, taking time off did some good. It seemed to have helped cure me out of the media numbness McLuhan says one gets when one jumps into a new media. It felt such a part of me, and to me seemed integrated with the rest of my life. So I thought I was making some sense, now I see that I didn't make much sense. Of course, I was always frustrated that blogging couldn't express everything I wanted to, but then which medium allows one to do that?

Great minds, no place in academics

Tony Smith's homepage



Discuss

More on Thai blogs

After unsuccessful googling for some kind of directory of Thai blogs, I had to opt for the tedious work of going through pages and pages of google results of webpages that had the words "Thai" and "blog" on it. It took me a whole night to just get the links below. They are what I would call "preferential' links, by the way, since they are the ones that I liked. I have not included a number of other blogs which blogged about Thailand, mostly those written by foreignors who seem to mostly enjoy ranting about the negative aspects of Thailand.



Anyway, that tedious search turned out to be productive because some of these links have links to other Thai blogs, which requires more reading on another day. I'm so frustrated that there isn't an easier way to do this.



What I also discovered was that there are a lot of young Thai-"Americans" (a growing new generation of Thais) blogging in a blogging ring called Xanga. Interesting that there are some claims that Xanga is growing faster than Friendster. I liked the ecclectic mix of people they have there and there seems to be some sense of order and respect among its members. I have to see what they have to offer as a community and as a blogging tool and may just decide to join them.



Additionally, Ross Mayfield mentions a blogging programme being tried out in Thailand by think.com which I haven't had the time to investigate just yet.



My preferential link collection of Thai blogs:



blogwise: List of blogs in Thailand This was a directory, that actually didn't have many "Thai" blogs. But who knows, it might grow.



"The voices in my head" A bit slow to download the whole page, but worth the wait to see the pictures she's posted. Blogged by a Thai.



"Just my thought" Blogged by a Thai.



"Stories from the life of Stuart G. Towns" who is not a Thai.



by Ron Morris, great source of news, and good pictures. Not Thai, but passionate about Thailand and its mass transit system.



Piyawat's a new Thai blogger and updates slowly.



"The House of Random Crap", Thai-American who moved to Thailand. Actually not crappy at all, quite intense.



"Wanderlustress" I think she's Thai, she certainly travels!



SOMMAIRE Not a Thai blog, but a blog (of sorts) by His Majesty Sihanouk, King of Cambodia. I've put it in my links here in hope that maybe King Bhumipol or Princess Sirindhorn will eventually blog. It would really be the establishment of the Thai blogosphere.



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