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Thai history
Thailand Siam
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Thai history
Thailand Siam
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The
history of Thailand proper
begins in the thirteenth century with the
overthrow by Thai chieftains of the Khmer governor of southern Siam and
the formation of the kingdom of Lavo. Then in 1287,
the year in which the Mongols captured Bagan,
the three most powerful Thai chieftains in the
central and northern region of today Thailand
combined to form an alliance.
This consolidated
both the kingdom of Sukhodaya, today Sukhothai,
the first to create an independent cultural
tradition, and a second major state whose capital
was farther north at Chiengmai, today Chiang Mai.
The pattern for Siamese or Thailand history was thus
established, with two main regions of power and
culture ; one in the flat rice-fields of the south,
around the lower reaches and delta of the Menam
river -today Chao Praya- |
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the other in the mountainous, forested
region of the river's northern tributaries, and including a region
of certain tributaries of the Mekong itself. Between them, the
central region around Sukhodaya or today Sukhothai
held an uneasy balance. |
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The inhabitants
of the southern region were predominantly Mon, and
they had been for centuries one of the main sources
of he intellectual strength of the Khmer empire.
Works of Khmer art had been made in their territory,
testimony to the
Hindu royal cult of Cambodia.
There survive a fair number
of Siamese fragments of Khmer art and it is clear
that Siamese art traditions take their rise from
provincial Khmer prototypes.
The people who
formed the new states were not Mon or Khmer,
but Thai. The Thai were actually from the same
ethnic group as the Vietnamese, and had,
during the early years relativ to the Christian era, been forced gradually
out of the regions of Canton and then Tonkin
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Thai History Sukhothai |
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by the pressure
of Chinese colonization.
Whereas the
Vietnamese
moved south-east along the coastal strip
into Annam,
overran Champa, and adopted Chinese culture and
methods of civilization.
The Thai crossed the
hills westward into the high reaches of the Mekong
and Menam. At the height of the power of the
Khmer empire they were not able to make much headway
down the rivers. But when Khmer fortunes declined
they were free to move into the outlying provinces,
make them their own, and ultimately wreck the
Cambodian heart of the empire,
utterly destroying its irrigation system. Siam (now
called Thailand) was their most successful venture.
Modern Laos is descended from another of their
kingdoms.
Thai
history show
they were
originally a tribal people without writing or an
organized state. Although the Buddhism they
eventually adopted from their contact with the
kingdom of Bagan gave them an integral culture, a
literature and a system of education, it could not
be converted into a state-religion unifying the
whole country and directing its efforts.
At the same time,
though they were adequate farmers, they never learned any elaborate hydraulic techniques like
those of the Khmer, which would have given them the
ability to amplify the resources of their land.
Also, their country was far off the Chinese-Indian
sea-trade routes. They therefore
lived a self-contained existence, in separate
city-states, and the history of the Thai
kingdoms was marked by internal dissensions and
shifts of power rather than by major foreign
encounters.
The Burmese or
Myanmar's,
their co-religionists, were their main
enemies, often subjecting them to cruel invasions.
Two Thai cities, Chiang Mai in the north and
Ayutthaya in the south, remained the principal
centers of foreign contact. Chiang Mai because of
its central position on the roads between Myanmar
and the rest of Southeast Asia, and Ayutthaya
for its place on the river in the heart of the
southern region.
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Thailand history Ayutthaya Buddha
Thai history Ayutthaya |
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The situation in
early Siam
was fairly complicated. The earliest
art of all in stone, stucco and terracotta, of which
very little survived, is the art of a kingdom called
Dvaravati, on the lower reaches of the Menam. This kingdom survived
for about six hundred years, from the sixth to
the twelfth centuries A D. It was the chief of the
Mon confederation, and its religion was Hinayana,
like that of the western Mon of Lower Myanmar.
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