As long as forty thousand years ago, Thailand was inhabited by hunter-gatherers who lived in semi-permanent settlements and used tools made of wood, bamboo and stone. By the end of the last Ice Age, around ten thousand years ago, these groups had become farmers, keeping chickens, pigs and cattle, and – as evidenced by the seeds and plant husks which have been discovered in caves in northern Thailand – cultivating rice and beans. This drift into an agricultural society gave rise to further technological developments: the earliest pottery found in Thailand has been dated to 6800 BC, while the recent excavations at Ban Chiang in the northeast have shown that bronze was being worked at least as early as 2000 BC. By two thousand years ago, the peoples of Southeast Asia had settled in small villages, among which there was regular communication and trade, but they had split into several broad families, differentiated by language and culture. At this time, the ancestors of the Thais, speaking proto-Thai languages, were still far away in southern China, whereas Thailand itself was inhabited by Austroasiatic speakers, among whom the Mon were to establish the region’s first distinctive civilization, Dvaravati.
The history of Dvaravati is ill-defined to say the least, but the name is applied to a distinctive culture complex which shared the Mon language and Theravada Buddhism. This form of religion may have entered Thailand during the third century BC, when the Indian emperor, Ashoka, is said to have sent missionaries to Suvarnabhumi, “land of gold”, which seems to correspond roughly to mainland Southeast Asia.
From the discovery of monastery boundary stones (sema), clay votive tablets and Indian-influenced Buddhist sculpture, it’s clear that Dvaravati was an extensive and prosperous Buddhist civilization that had its greatest flourishing between the sixth and ninth centuries AD. No strong evidence has turned up, however, for the existence of a single capital – rather than an empire, Dvaravati seems to have been a collection of city-states. Nakhon Pathom, Lopburi, Si Thep and Muang Sema were among the most important Dvaravati sites, and their concentration around the Chao Phraya valley would seem to show that they gained much of their prosperity, and maintained religious and cultural contacts with India, via the trade route from the Indian Ocean over the Three Pagodas Pass.
Although they passed on aspects of their heavily Indianized art, religion and government to later rulers of Thailand, these Mon city-states were politically fragile and from the ninth century onwards succumbed to the domination of the invading Khmers from Cambodia. One northern outpost, the state of Haripunjaya, centred on Lamphun, which had been set up on the trade route with southern China, maintained its independence until the thirteenth century.
Meanwhile, to the south of Dvaravati, the shadowy Indianized state of Lankasuka had grown up in the second century, centred on Ligor (now Nakhon Si Thammarat) and covering an area of the Malay peninsula which included the important trade crossings at Chaiya and Trang. In the eighth century, it came under the control of Srivijaya, a Mahayana Buddhist city-state on Sumatra, which had strong ties with India and a complex but uneasy relationship with neighbouring Java. Thriving on seaborne trade between Persia and China, Srivijaya extended its influence as far north as Chaiya, its regional capital, where discoveries of temple remains and some of the finest stone and bronze statues ever produced in Thailand have borne witness to the cultural vitality of this crossroads empire. In the tenth century the northern part of Lankasuka, under the name Tambralinga, regained a measure of independence, although it seems still to have come under the influence of Srivijaya as well as owing some form of allegiance to Dvaravati. By the beginning of the eleventh century, however, peninsular Thailand had come under the sway of the Khmer empire, with a Cambodian prince ruling over a community of Khmer settlers and soldiers at Tambralinga.
The history of central Southeast Asia comes into sharper focus with the emergence of the Khmers, vigorous empire-builders whose political history can be pieced together from the numerous stone inscriptions they left. The Khmers of Chenla – to the north of Cambodia – seized power in the latter half of the sixth century during a period of economic decline in the area. Chenla’s rise to power was knocked back by a punitive expedition conducted by the Srivijaya empire in the eighth century, but was reconsolidated during the watershed reign of Jayavarman II (802–50), who succeeded in conquering the whole of Kambuja, an area which roughly corresponds to modern-day Cambodia. In order to establish the authority of his monarchy and of his country, Jayavarman II had himself initiated as a chakravartin, or universal ruler, the living embodiment of the devaraja, the divine essence of kingship – a concept which was adopted by later Thai rulers. Taking as the symbol of his authority the phallic lingam, the king was thus identified with the god Shiva, although the Khmer concept of kingship and thus the religious mix of the state as a whole was not confined to Hinduism: elements of ancestor worship were also included, and Mahayana Buddhism gradually increased its hold over the next four centuries.
It was Jayavarman II who moved the Khmer capital to Angkor in northern Cambodia, which he and later kings, especially after the eleventh century, embellished with a series of prodigiously beautiful temples. Jayavarman II also recognized the advantages of the lakes around Angkor for irrigating rice fields and providing fish, and thus for feeding a large population. His successors developed this idea and gave the state a sound economic core with a remarkably complex system of reservoirs (baray) and water channels, which were copied and adapted in later Thai cities.
In the ninth and tenth centuries, Jayavarman II and his imperialistic successors, especially Yasovarman I (889–900), confirmed Angkor as the major power in Southeast Asia. They pushed into Vietnam, Laos and southern China, as well as into northeastern Thailand, where the Khmers left dozens of Angkor-style temple complexes, as seen today at Prasat Phanom Rung and Prasat Hin Phimai. To the west and northwest, Angkor took control over central Thailand, with its most important outpost at Lopburi, and even established a strong presence to the south on the Malay peninsula. As a result of this expansion, the Khmers were masters of the most important trade routes between India and China, and indeed nearly every communications link in the region, from which they were able to derive huge income and strength.
The reign of Jayavarman VII (1181–1219), a Mahayana Buddhist who firmly believed in his royal destiny as a bodhisattva, sowed the seeds of Angkor’s downfall. Nearly half of all the surviving great religious monuments of the empire were erected under his supervision, but the ambitious scale of these building projects and the upkeep they demanded – some 300,000 priests and temple servants of 20,000 shrines consumed 38,000 tonnes of rice per year – along with a series of wars against Vietnam, exhausted the economy.
In subsequent reigns, much of the life-giving irrigation system around Angkor turned into malarial swamp through neglect, and the rise of the more democratic creed of Theravada Buddhism undermined the divine authority which the Khmer kings had derived from the hierarchical Mahayana creed. As a result of all these factors, the Khmers were in no position to resist the onslaught between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries of the vibrant new force in Southeast Asia, the Thais.
The earliest traceable history of the Thai people picks them up in southern China around the fifth century AD, when they were squeezed by Chinese and Vietnamese expansionism into sparsely inhabited northeastern Laos and neighbouring areas. The first entry of a significant number of Thais onto what is now Thailand’s soil seems to have happened in the region of Chiang Saen, where it appears that some time after the seventh century the Thais formed a state in an area then known as Yonok. A development which can be more accurately dated and which had immense cultural significance was the spread of Theravada Buddhism to Yonok via Dvaravati around the end of the tenth century, which served not only to unify the Thais but also to link them to Mon civilization and give them a sense of belonging to the community of Buddhists.
The Thais’ political development was also assisted by Nan-chao, a well-organized military state comprising a huge variety of ethnic groups, which established itself as a major player on the southern fringes of the Chinese empire from the beginning of the eighth century. As far as can be gathered, Nan-chao permitted the rise of Thai muang or small principalities on its periphery, especially in the area immediately to the south known as Sipsong Panna.
Thai infiltration continued until, by the end of the twelfth century, they seem to have formed the majority of the population in Thailand, then under the control of the Khmer empire. The Khmers’ main outpost, at Lopburi, was by then regarded as the administrative capital of a land called “Syam” (possibly from the Sanskrit syam, meaning swarthy) – a mid-twelfth-century bas-relief at Angkor Wat, portraying the troops of Lopburi preceded by a large group of self-confident Syam Kuk mercenaries, shows that the Thais were becoming a force to be reckoned with.
By the middle of the thirteenth century, the Thais, thanks largely to the decline of Angkor and the inspiring effect of Theravada Buddhism, were poised on the verge of autonomous power. The final catalyst was the invasion by Qubilai Khan’s Mongol armies of China and Nan-chao, which began around 1215 and was completed in the 1250s. Demanding that the whole world should acknowledge the primacy of the Great Khan, the Mongols set their hearts on the “pacification” of the “barbarians” to the south of China, which obliged the Thais to form a broad powerbase to meet the threat.
The founding of the first Thai kingdom at Sukhothai, now popularly viewed as the cornerstone of the country’s development, was in fact a small-scale piece of opportunism which almost fell at the first hurdle. At some time around 1238, the princes of two small Thai principalities in the upper Chao Phraya valley joined forces to capture the main Khmer outpost in the region at Sukhothai. One of the princes, Intradit, was crowned king, but for the first forty years Sukhothai remained merely a local power, whose existence was threatened by the ambitions of neighbouring princes. When attacked by the ruler of Mae Sot, Intradit’s army was only saved by the grand entrance of Sukhothai’s most dynamic leader: the king’s 19-year-old son, Rama, held his ground and pushed forward to defeat the opposing commander, earning himself the name Ramkhamhaeng, “Rama the Bold”.
When Ramkhamhaeng came to the throne around 1278, he saw the south as his most promising avenue for expansion and, copying the formidable military organization of the Mongols, established control over much of the Chao Phraya valley. Over the next twenty years, largely by diplomacy rather than military action, Ramkhamhaeng gained the submission of most of modern-day Thailand; local rulers entered into a complex system of tribute-giving and protection – the political system that persisted in Thailand until the end of the nineteenth century – either through the pressure of the Sukhothai king’s personal connections or out of recognition of his superior military strength and moral prestige. To the east, Ramkhamhaeng extended his sphere of influence as far as Vientiane in Laos; by marrying his daughter to a Mon ruler to the west, he obtained the allegiance of parts of southern Burma; and to the south his vassals stretched down the peninsula at least as far as Nakhon Si Thammarat. To the north, Sukhothai concluded an alliance with the parallel Thai states of Lanna and Phayao in 1287 for mutual protection against the Mongols – though it appears that Ramkhamhaeng managed to pinch several muang on their eastern periphery as tribute states.
Meanwhile Lopburi, which had wrested itself free from Angkor some time in the middle of the thirteenth century, was able to keep its independence and its control of the eastern side of the Chao Phraya valley. Having been first a major cultural and religious centre for the Mon, then the Khmers’ provincial capital, and now a state dominated by migrating Thais, Lopburi was a strong and vibrant place mixing the best of the three cultures, as evidenced by the numerous original works of art produced at this time.
Although Sukhothai extended Thai influence over a vast area, its greatest contribution to the Thais’ development was at home, in cultural and political matters. A famous inscription by Ramkhamhaeng, now housed in the Bangkok National Museum, describes a prosperous era of benevolent rule: “In the time of King Ramkhamhaeng this land of Sukhothai is thriving. There is fish in the water and rice in the fields … [The King] has hung a bell in the opening of the gate over there: if any commoner has a grievance which sickens his belly and gripes his heart … he goes and strikes the bell … [and King Ramkhamhaeng] questions the man, examines the case, and decides it justly for him.” Although this plainly smacks of self-promotion, it seems to contain at least a kernel of truth: in deliberate contrast to the Khmer god-kings, Ramkhamhaeng styled himself as a dhammaraja, a king who ruled justly according to Theravada Buddhist doctrine and made himself accessible to his people. To honour the state religion, the city’s temples were lavishly endowed: as original as Sukhothai’s political systems were its religious architecture and sculpture, which, though bound to borrow from existing Khmer and Sri Lankan styles, show the greatest leap of creativity at any stage in the history of art in Thailand. A further sign of the Thais’ new self-confidence was the invention of a new script to make their tonal language understood by the non-Thai inhabitants of the land.
All this was achieved in a remarkably short period of time. After the death of Ramkhamhaeng around 1299, his successors took their Buddhism so seriously that they neglected affairs of state, and by 1320 Sukhothai had regressed to being a kingdom of only local significance.
Almost simultaneous with the birth of Sukhothai was the establishment of a less momentous but longer-lasting kingdom to the north, called Lanna. Its founding father was Mengrai, chief of Ngon Yang, a small principality on the banks of the Mekong near modern-day Chiang Saen. Around 1259 he set out to unify the squabbling Thai principalities of the region, first building a strategically placed city at Chiang Rai in 1262, and then forging alliances with Ngam Muang, the Thai king of Phayao, and with Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai.
In 1281, after ten years of guileful preparations, Mengrai conquered the Mon kingdom of Haripunjaya based at Lamphun, and was now master of northern Thailand. Taking advice from Ngam Muang and Ramkhamhaeng, in 1292 he selected a site for an impressive new capital of Lanna at Chiang Mai, which remains the centre of the north to the present day. Mengrai concluded further alliances in Burma and Laos, making him strong enough to successfully resist further Mongol attacks, although he was eventually obliged to bow to the superiority of the Mongols by sending them small tributes from 1312 onwards. When Mengrai died after a sixty-year reign in 1317, supposedly struck by a bolt of lightning, he had built up an extensive and powerful kingdom. But although he began a tradition of humane, reasonable laws, probably borrowed from the Mons, he had found little time to set up sound political and administrative institutions. His death severely destabilized Lanna, which quickly shrank in size and influence.
It was only in the reign of Ku Na (1355–85) that Lanna’s development regained momentum. A well-educated and effective ruler, Ku Na enticed the venerable monk Sumana, from Sukhothai, to establish an ascetic Sri Lankan sect in Lanna in 1369. Sumana brought a number of Buddha images with him, inspiring a new school of art that flourished for over a century, but more importantly his sect became a cultural force that had a profound unifying effect on the kingdom. The influence of Buddhism was further strengthened under Tilok (1441–87), who built many great monuments at Chiang Mai and cast huge numbers of bronze seated Buddhas in the style of the central image at Bodh Gaya in India, the scene of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Tilok, however, is best remembered as a great warrior, who spent most of his reign resisting the advances of Ayutthaya, by now the strongest Thai kingdom.
Under continuing pressure both from Ayutthaya and from Burma, Lanna went into rapid decline in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. For a short period after 1546, Chiang Mai came under the control of Setthathirat, the king of Lan Sang (Laos), but, unable to cope with Lanna’s warring factions, he then abdicated, purloining the talismanic Emerald Buddha for his own capital at Luang Prabang. In 1558, Burma decisively captured Chiang Mai, and the Mengrai dynasty came to an end. For most of the next two centuries, the Burmese maintained control through a succession of puppet rulers, and Lanna again became much as it had been before Mengrai, little more than a chain of competing principalities.
While Lanna was fighting for its place as a marginalized kingdom, from the fourteenth century onwards the seeds of a full-blown Thai nation were being sown to the south at Ayutthaya. The city of Ayutthaya itself was founded on its present site in 1351 by U Thong (“Golden Cradle”) of Lopburi. Taking the title Ramathibodi, he soon united the principalities of the lower Chao Phraya valley, which had formed the western provinces of the Khmer empire. When he recruited his bureaucracy from the urban elite of Lopburi, Ramathibodi set the style of government at Ayutthaya – the elaborate etiquette, language and rituals of Angkor were adopted, and, most importantly, the conception of the ruler as devaraja. The king became sacred and remote, an object of awe and dread, with none of the accessibility of the kings of Sukhothai: when he processed through the town, ordinary people were forbidden to look at him and had to be silent while he passed. This hierarchical system also provided the state with much-needed manpower, as all freemen were obliged to give up six months of each year to the Crown either on public works or military service.
The site chosen by Ramathibodi turned out to be the best in the region for an international port, and so began Ayutthaya’s rise to prosperity, based on its ability to exploit the upswing in trade in the middle of the fourteenth century along the routes between India and China. Flushed with economic success, Ramathibodi’s successors were able to expand their control over the ailing states in the region. After a long period of subjugation, Sukhothai became a province of the kingdom of Ayutthaya in 1438, six years after Boromraja II had powerfully demonstrated Ayutthaya’s pre-eminence by capturing the once-mighty Angkor, enslaving large numbers of its subjects and looting the Khmer royal regalia. (The Cambodian royal family were forced to abandon the palace and to found a new capital near Phnom Penh.)
Although a century of nearly continuous warfare against Lanna was less decisive, success generally bred success, and Ayutthaya’s increasing wealth through trade brought ever greater power over its neighbouring states. To streamline the functioning of his unwieldy empire, Trailok (1448–88) found it necessary to make reforms to its administration. His Law of Civil Hierarchy formally entrenched the inequality of Ayutthayan society, defining the status of every individual by assigning him or her an imaginary number of rice fields – for example, 25 for an ordinary freeman and 10,000 for the highest ministers of state. Trailok’s legacy is found in today’s unofficial but fiendishly complex status system, by which everyone in Thailand knows their place.
Ramathibodi II (1491–1529), almost at a loss as to what to do with his enormous wealth, undertook an extensive programme of public works. In the 1490s he built several major religious monuments, and between 1500 and 1503 cast the largest standing metal image of the Buddha ever known, the Phra Si Sanphet, which gave its name to the temple of the royal palace. By 1540, Ayutthaya had established control over most of the area of modern-day Thailand.
Burmese wars and European trade
In the sixteenth century recurring tensions with Burma led Chakkraphat (1548–69) to improve his army and build brick ramparts around the capital. This was to no avail however: in 1568 the Burmese besieged Ayutthaya with a huge army, said by later accounts to have consisted of 1,400,000 men. The Thais held out until August 8, 1569, when treachery within their own ranks helped the Burmese break through the defences. The Burmese looted the city, took thousands of prisoners and installed a vassal king to keep control.
The decisive character who broke the Burmese stranglehold twenty years later and re-established Ayutthaya’s economic growth was Naresuan (1590–1605), who defied the Burmese by amassing a large army. The enemy sent a punitive expedition, which was conclusively defeated at Nong Sarai near modern-day Suphanburi on January 18, 1593, Naresuan himself turning the battle by killing the Burmese crown prince. Historians have praised Naresuan for his personal bravery and his dynamic leadership, although the chronicles of the time record a strong streak of tyranny – in his fifteen years as king he had eighty thousand people killed, excluding the victims of war. A favoured means of punishment was to slice off pieces of the offender’s flesh, which he was then made to eat in the king’s presence.
The period following Naresuan’s reign was characterized by a more sophisticated engagement in foreign trade. In 1511 the Portuguese had become the first Western power to trade with Ayutthaya, and Naresuan himself concluded a treaty with Spain in 1598; relations with Holland and England were initiated in 1608 and 1612 respectively. For most of the seventeenth century, European merchants flocked to Thailand, not only to buy Thai products, but also to gain access to Chinese and Japanese goods on sale there. The role of foreigners at Ayutthaya reached its peak under Narai (1656–88), but he overstepped the mark in cultivating close links with Louis XIV of France, who secretly harboured the notion of converting Ayutthaya to Christianity. On Narai’s death, relations with Westerners were cut back.
Despite this reduction of trade and prolonged civil strife over the succession to the throne whenever a king died – then, as now, there wasn’t a fixed principle of primogeniture – Ayutthaya continued to flourish for much of the eighteenth century. The reign of Borommakot (1733–58) was particularly prosperous, producing many works of drama and poetry. Furthermore, Thai Buddhism had by then achieved such prestige that Sri Lanka, from where the Thais had originally imported their form of religion in the thirteenth century, requested Thai aid in restoring their monastic orders in 1751.
However, immediately after the death of Borommakot the rumbling in the Burmese jungle to the north began to make itself heard again. Alaunghpaya of Burma, apparently a blindly aggressive country bumpkin, first recaptured the south of his country from the Mon, and then turned his attentions to Ayutthaya. A siege in 1760 was unsuccessful, with Alaunghpaya dying of wounds sustained there, but the scene was set. In February 1766 the Burmese descended upon Ayutthaya for the last time. The Thais held out for over a year, during which they were afflicted by famine, epidemics and a terrible fire that destroyed ten thousand houses. Finally, in April 1767, the walls were breached and the city taken. The Burmese razed everything to the ground and tens of thousands of prisoners were led off to Burma, including most of the royal family. The king, Suriyamarin, is said to have escaped from the city in a boat and starved to death ten days later. As one observer has said, the Burmese laid waste to Ayutthaya “in such a savage manner that it is hard to imagine that they shared the same religion with the Siamese”. The city was abandoned to the jungle, but with remarkable speed the Thais regrouped and established a new seat of power, further down the Chao Phraya River at Bangkok.
As the bulk of the Burmese army was obliged by war with China to withdraw almost immediately, Thailand was left to descend into banditry. Out of this lawless mess several centres of power arose, the most significant being at Chanthaburi, commanded by Phraya Taksin. A charismatic, brave and able general who had been unfairly blamed for a failed counterattack against the Burmese at Ayutthaya, Taksin had anticipated the fall of the besieged city and quietly slipped away with a force of five hundred men. In June 1767 he took control of the east-coast strip around Chanthaburi and very rapidly expanded his power across central Thailand.
Blessed with the financial backing of the Chinese trading community, to whom he was connected through his father, Taksin was crowned king in December 1768 at his new capital of Thonburi, on the opposite bank of the river from modern-day Bangkok. One by one the new king defeated his rivals, and within two years he had restored all of Ayutthaya’s territories. More remarkably, by the end of the next decade Taksin had outdone his Ayutthayan predecessors by bringing Lanna, Cambodia and much of Laos under his sway. During this period of expansionism, Taksin left most of the fighting to Thong Duang, an ambitious soldier and descendant of an Ayutthayan noble family, who became the chakri, the military commander, and took the title Chao Phraya Chakri.
However, by 1779 all was not well with the king. Being an outsider, who had risen from an ordinary family on the fringes of society, Taksin became paranoid about plots against him, a delusion that drove him to imprison and torture even his wife and sons. At the same time he sank into religious excesses, demanding that the monkhood worship him as a god. By March 1782, public outrage at his sadism and dangerously irrational behaviour had reached such fervour that he was ousted in a coup.
Chao Phraya Chakri was invited to take power and had Taksin executed. In accordance with ancient etiquette, this had to be done without royal blood touching the earth: the king was duly wrapped in a black velvet sack and struck on the back of the neck with a sandalwood club. (Popular tradition has it that even this form of execution was too much: an unfortunate substitute got the velvet sack treatment, while Taksin was whisked away to a palace in the hills near Nakhon Si Thammarat, where he is said to have lived until 1825.)
With the support of the Ayutthayan aristocracy, Chakri – reigning as Rama I (1782–1809) – set about consolidating the Thai kingdom. His first act was to move the capital across the river to Bangkok, a better defensive position against any Burmese attack from the west. Borrowing from the layout of Ayutthaya, he built a new royal palace and impressive monasteries, and enshrined in the palace wat the Emerald Buddha, which he had snatched back during his campaigns in Laos.
As all the state records had disappeared in the destruction of Ayutthaya, religious and legal texts had to be written afresh and historical chronicles reconstituted – with some very sketchy guesswork. The monkhood was in such a state of crisis that it was widely held that moral decay had been partly responsible for Ayutthaya’s downfall. Within a month of becoming king, Rama I issued a series of religious laws and made appointments to the leadership of the monkhood, to restore discipline and confidence after the excesses of Taksin’s reign. Many works of drama and poetry had also been lost in the sacking of Ayutthaya, so Rama I set about rebuilding the Thais’ literary heritage, at the same time attempting to make it more cosmopolitan and populist. His main contribution was the Ramakien, a dramatic version of the Indian epic Ramayana, which is said to have been set to verse by the king himself – with a little help from his courtiers – in 1797. Heavily adapted to its Thai setting, the Ramakien served as an affirmation of the new monarchy and its divine links, and has since become the national epic.
In the early part of Rama I’s reign, the Burmese reopened hostilities on several occasions, the biggest attempted invasion coming in 1785, but the emphatic manner in which the Thais repulsed them only served to knit together the young kingdom. Trade with China revived, and the king addressed the besetting problem of manpower by ordering every man to be tattooed with the name of his master and his town, so that avoiding royal service became almost impossible. On a more general note, Rama I put the style of government in Thailand on a modern footing: while retaining many of the features of a devaraja, he shared more responsibility with his courtiers, as a first among equals.
The peaceful accession of his son as Rama II (1809–24) signalled the establishment of the Chakri dynasty, which is still in place today. This Second Reign was a quiet interlude, best remembered as a fertile period for Thai literature. The king, himself one of the great Thai poets, gathered round him a group of writers including the famous Sunthorn Phu, who produced scores of masterly love poems, travel accounts and narrative songs.
In contrast, Rama III (1824–51) actively discouraged literary development – probably in reaction against his father – and was a vigorous defender of conservative values. To this end, he embarked on an extraordinary redevelopment of Wat Pho, the oldest temple in Bangkok. Hundreds of educational inscriptions and mural paintings, on all manner of secular and religious subjects, were put on show, apparently to preserve traditional culture against the rapid change which the king saw corroding the country. In foreign affairs, Rama III faced a serious threat from the vassal states of Laos, who in 1827 sent an invading army from Vientiane, which got as far as Saraburi, only three days’ march from Bangkok. The king’s response was savage: having repelled the initial invasion, he ordered his army to destroy everything in Vientiane apart from Buddhist temples and to forcibly resettle huge numbers of Lao in Isaan. In 1834, the king went to war in Cambodia, in a tug of war with Vietnam for control of the land in between; after fourteen years of indecisive warfare, Cambodia lay devastated but in much the same servile position – as one Vietnamese emperor described it, “an independent country that is slave of two”.
More significant in the long run was the danger posed by the increase in Western influence that began in the Third Reign. As early as 1825, the Thais were sufficiently alarmed at British colonialism to strengthen Bangkok’s defences by stretching a great iron chain across the mouth of the Chao Phraya River, to which every blacksmith in the area had to donate a certain number of links. In 1826 Rama III was obliged to sign a limited trade agreement with the British, the Burney Treaty, by which the Thais won some political security in return for reducing their taxes on goods passing through Bangkok. British and American missions in 1850 unsuccessfully demanded more radical concessions, but by this time Rama III was seriously ill, and it was left to his far-sighted and progressive successors to reach a decisive accommodation with the Western powers.
Rama IV (1851–68), commonly known to foreigners as Mongkut (in Thai, Phra Chom Klao), had been a Buddhist monk for 27 years when he succeeded his brother. But far from leading a cloistered life, Mongkut had travelled widely throughout Thailand, had maintained scholarly contacts with French and American missionaries and, like most of the country’s new generation of leaders, had taken an interest in Western learning, studying English, Latin and the sciences. He had also turned his mind to the condition of Buddhism in Thailand, which seemed to him to have descended into little more than popular superstition; indeed, after a study of the Buddhist scriptures in Pali, he was horrified to find that Thai ordinations were probably invalid. So in the late 1830s he set up the rigorously fundamentalist Thammayut sect (the “Order Adhering to the Teachings of the Buddha”) and as abbot of the order he oversaw the training of a generation of scholarly leaders for Thai Buddhism from his base at Bangkok’s Wat Bowonniwet, which became a major centre of Western learning and is still sponsored by the royal family.
When his kingship faced its first major test, in the form of a threatening British mission in 1855 led by Sir John Bowring, the Governor of Hong Kong, Mongkut dealt with it confidently. Realizing that Thailand was unable to resist the military might of the British, the king reduced import and export taxes, allowed British subjects to live and own land in Thailand and granted them freedom of trade. Of the government monopolies, which had long been the mainstay of the Thai economy, only that on opium was retained. After making up the loss in revenue through internal taxation, Mongkut quickly made it known that he would welcome diplomatic contacts from other Western countries: within a decade, agreements similar to the Bowring Treaty had been signed with France, the US and a score of other nations. Thus by skilful diplomacy the king avoided a close relationship with only one power, which could easily have led to Thailand’s annexation.
While all around the colonial powers were carving up Southeast Asia among themselves, Thailand suffered nothing more than the weakening of its influence over Cambodia, which in 1863 the French brought under their protection. As a result of the open-door policy, foreign trade boomed, financing the redevelopment of Bangkok’s waterfront and, for the first time, the building of paved roads. However, Mongkut ran out of time for instituting the far-reaching domestic reforms which he saw were needed to drag Thailand into the modern world.
Mongkut’s son, Chulalongkorn, took the throne as Rama V (1868–1910) at the age of only 15, but he was well prepared by an education which mixed traditional Thai and modern Western elements – provided by Mrs Anna Leonowens, subject of The King and I. When Chulalongkorn reached his majority after a five-year regency, he set to work on the reforms envisaged by his father. One of his first acts was to scrap the custom by which subjects were required to prostrate themselves in the presence of the king, which he followed up in 1874 with a series of decrees announcing the gradual abolition of slavery. The speed of his financial and administrative reforms, however, proved too much for the “Ancients” (hua boran), the old guard of ministers and officials inherited from his father. Their opposition culminated in the Front Palace Crisis of 1875, when a show of military strength almost plunged the country into civil war, and, although Chulalongkorn skilfully defused the crisis, many of his reforms had to be quietly shelved for the time being.
An important administrative reform that did go through, necessitated by the threat of colonial expansionism, concerned the former kingdom of Lanna. British exploitation of teak had recently spread into northern Thailand from neighbouring Burma, so in 1874 Chulalongkorn sent a commissioner to Chiang Mai to keep an eye on the prince of Chiang Mai and make sure that he avoided any collision with the British. The commissioner was gradually able to limit the power of the princes and to begin to integrate the region into the kingdom.
In the 1880s prospects for reform brightened as many of the “Ancients” died or retired. This allowed Chulalongkorn to restructure the government to meet the country’s needs: the Royal Audit Office made possible the proper control of revenue and finance; the Department of the Army became the nucleus of a modern armed services; and a host of other departments was set up, for justice, education, public health and the like. To fill these new positions, the king appointed many of his younger brothers, who had all received a modern education, while scores of foreign technicians and advisers were brought in to help with everything from foreign affairs to rail lines.
Throughout this period, however, the Western powers maintained their pressure on the region. The most serious threat to Thai sovereignty was the Franco–Siamese Crisis of 1893, which culminated in the French, based in Vietnam, sending gunboats up the Chao Phraya River to Bangkok. Flouting numerous international laws, France claimed control over Laos and made other outrageous demands, which Chulalongkorn had no option but to concede. In 1907 Thailand was also forced to acknowledge French control over Cambodia, and in 1909 three Malay states fell to the British (while Thailand retained a fourth Muslim state, Pattani). In order to preserve its independence, the country ceded control over huge areas of tributary states and forwent huge sums of tax revenue. But from the end of the Fifth Reign, the frontiers were fixed as they are today.
By the time of the king’s death in 1910, Thailand could not yet be called a modern nation-state – Bangkok still did not have complete control over the outermost regions, and corruption and nepotism were grave problems, for example. However, Chulalongkorn had made remarkable advances, and, almost from scratch, had established the political institutions to cope with twentieth-century development.
Chulalongkorn was succeeded by a flamboyant, British-educated prince, Vajiravudh, who was crowned Rama VI (1910–25). The new king found it difficult to shake the dominance of his father’s appointees in the government, who formed an extremely narrow elite, comprised almost entirely of members of Chulalongkorn’s family. In an attempt to build up a personal following, Vajiravudh created, in May 1911, the Wild Tigers, a nationwide paramilitary corps recruited widely from the civil service. However, in 1912 a group of young army lieutenants, disillusioned by the absolute monarchy and upset at the downgrading of the regular army in favour of the Wild Tigers, plotted a coup. The conspirators were easily broken up before any trouble began, but this was something new in Thai history: the country was used to in-fighting among the royal family, but not to military intrigue from men from comparatively ordinary backgrounds.
Vajiravudh’s response to the coup was a series of modernizing reforms, including the introduction of compulsory primary education and an attempt to better the status of women by supporting monogamy in place of the widespread practice of polygamy. His huge output of writings invariably encouraged people to live as modern Westerners, and he brought large numbers of commoners into high positions in government. Nonetheless, he would not relinquish his strong opposition to constitutional democracy.
When World War I broke out in 1914, the Thais were generally sympathetic to the Germans out of resentment over their loss of territory to the French and British. The king, however, was in favour of neutrality, until the US entered the war in 1917, when Thailand followed the expedient policy of joining the winning side and sent an expeditionary force of 1300 men to France in June 1918. The goodwill earned by this gesture enabled the Thais, between 1920 and 1926, to negotiate away the unequal treaties that had been imposed on them by the Western powers. Foreigners on Thai soil were no longer exempted from Thai laws, and the Thais were allowed to set reasonable rates of import and export taxes.
Vajiravudh’s extravagant lifestyle – during his reign, royal expenditure amounted to as much as ten percent of the state budget – left severe financial problems for his successor. Vajiravudh died without leaving a son, and as three better-placed contenders to the Crown all died in the 1920s, Prajadhipok – the seventy-sixth child and last son of Chulalongkorn – was catapulted to the throne as Rama VII (1925–35). Young and inexperienced, he responded to the country’s crisis by creating a Supreme Council of State, seen by many as a return to Chulalongkorn’s absolutist “government by princes”.
Prajadhipok himself seems to have been in favour of constitutional government, but the weakness of his personality and the opposition of the old guard in the Supreme Council prevented him from introducing it. Meanwhile a vigorous community of Western-educated intellectuals had emerged in the lower echelons of the bureaucracy, who were increasingly dissatisfied with the injustices of monarchical government. The final shock to the Thai system came with the Great Depression, which from 1930 onwards ravaged the economy. On June 24, 1932, a small group of middle-ranking officials, led by a lawyer, Pridi Phanomyong, and an army major, Luang Phibunsongkhram, staged a coup with only a handful of troops. Prajadhipok weakly submitted to the conspirators, or “Promoters”, and 150 years of absolute monarchy in Bangkok came to a sudden end. The king was sidelined to a position of symbolic significance and in 1935 he abdicated in favour of his 10-year-old nephew, Ananda, then a schoolboy living in Switzerland.
The success of the 1932 coup was in large measure attributable to the army officers who gave the conspirators credibility, and it was they who were to dominate the constitutional regimes that followed. The Promoters’ first worry was that the French or British might attempt to restore the monarchy to full power. To deflect such intervention, they appointed a government under a provisional constitution and espoused a wide range of liberal Western-type reforms, including freedom of the press and social equality, few of which ever saw the light of day.
The regime’s first crisis came early in 1933 when Pridi Phanomyong, by now leader of the government’s civilian faction, put forward a socialist economic plan based on the nationalization of land and labour. The proposal was denounced as communistic by the military, Pridi was forced into temporary exile and an anti-communist law was passed. Then, in October, a royalist coup was mounted which brought the kingdom close to civil war. After intense fighting, the rebels were defeated by Lieutenant-Colonel Luang Phibunsongkhram (or Phibun), so strengthening the government and bringing Phibun to the fore as the leading light of the military faction.
Pridi was rehabilitated in 1934 and remained powerful and popular, especially among the intelligentsia, but it was Phibun who became prime minister after the decisive elections of 1938, presiding over a cabinet dominated by military men. Phibun encouraged a wave of nationalistic feeling with such measures as the official institution of the name Thailand in 1939 – Siam, it was argued, was a name bestowed by external forces, and the new title made it clear that the country belonged to the Thais rather than the economically dominant Chinese. This latter sentiment was reinforced with a series of harsh laws against the Chinese, who faced discriminatory taxes on income and commerce.
The outbreak of World War II gave the Thais the chance to avenge the humiliation of the 1893 Franco–Siamese Crisis. When France was occupied by Germany in June 1940, Phibun seized the opportunity to invade western Cambodia and the area of Laos lying to the west of the Mekong River. In the following year, however, the threat of a Japanese attack on Thailand loomed. On December 8, 1941, almost at the same time as the assault on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invaded the country at nine points, most of them along the east coast of the peninsula. The Thais at first resisted for a few hours, but realizing that the position was hopeless, Phibun quickly ordered a ceasefire. Meanwhile, the British sent a force from Malaysia to try to stop the Japanese at Songkhla, but were held up in a fight with Thai border police. The Japanese had time to establish themselves, before pushing down the peninsula to take Singapore.
The Thai government concluded a military alliance with Japan and declared war against the US and Great Britain in January 1942, probably in the belief that the Japanese would win the war. However, the Thai minister in Washington, Seni Pramoj, refused to deliver the declaration of war against the US and, in cooperation with the Americans, began organizing a resistance movement called Seri Thai. Pridi, now acting as regent to the young king, furtively coordinated the movement under the noses of the occupying Japanese, smuggling in American agents and housing them in a European prison camp in Bangkok.
By 1944 Japan’s final defeat looked likely, and Phibun, who had been most closely associated with them, was forced to resign by the National Assembly in July. A civilian, Khuang Aphaiwong, was chosen as prime minister, while Seri Thai became well established in the government under the control of Pridi. At the end of the war, Thailand was forced to restore the annexed Cambodian and Lao provinces to French Indochina, but American support prevented the British from imposing heavy punishments for the alliance with Japan.
With the fading of the military, the election of January 1946 was for the first time contested by organized political parties, resulting in Pridi becoming prime minister. A new constitution was drafted and the outlook for democratic, civilian government seemed bright.
Hopes were shattered, however, on June 9, 1946, when King Ananda was found dead in his bed, with a bullet wound in his forehead. Three palace servants were tried and executed, but the murder has never been satisfactorily explained. Public opinion attached at least indirect responsibility for the killing to Pridi, who had in the past shown anti-royalist feeling. He resigned as prime minister, and in April 1948 the military made a decisive return: playing on the threat of communism, with Pridi pictured as a Red bogeyman, Phibun took over the premiership.
After the bloody suppression of two attempted coups in favour of Pridi, the main feature of Phibun’s second regime was its heavy involvement with the US. As communism developed its hold in the region, with the takeover of China in 1949 and the French defeat in Indochina in 1954, the US increasingly viewed Thailand as a bulwark against the Red menace. Between 1951 and 1957, when its annual state budget was only about $200 million a year, Thailand received a total $149 million in American economic aid and $222 million in military aid. This strengthened Phibun’s dictatorship, while enabling leading military figures to divert American money and other funds into their own pockets.
In 1955, his position threatened by two rival generals, Phibun experienced a sudden conversion to the cause of democracy. He narrowly won a general election in 1957, but only by blatant vote-rigging and coercion. Although there’s a strong tradition of foul play in Thai elections, this is remembered as the dirtiest ever: after vehement public outcry, General Sarit, the commander-in-chief of the army, overthrew the new government in September 1957.
Believing that Thailand would prosper best under a unifying authority – an ideology that still has plenty of supporters today – Sarit set about re-establishing the monarchy as the head of the social hierarchy and the source of legitimacy for the government. Ananda’s successor, King Bhumibol (Rama IX), was pushed into an active role while Sarit ruthlessly silenced critics and pressed ahead with a plan for economic development. These policies achieved a large measure of stability and prosperity at home, although from 1960 onwards the international situation worsened. With the Marxist Pathet Lao making considerable advances in Laos, and Cambodia’s ruler, Prince Sihanouk, drawing into closer relations with China, Sarit turned again to the US. The Americans obliged by sharply increasing military aid and by stationing troops in Thailand.
Sarit died in 1963, whereupon the military succession passed to General Thanom, closely aided by his deputy prime minister, General Praphas. Neither man had anything of Sarit’s charisma and during a decade in power they followed his political philosophies largely unchanged. Their most pressing problem was the resumption of open hostilities between North and South Vietnam in the early 1960s – the Vietnam War. Both Laos and Cambodia became involved on the side of the communists by allowing the North Vietnamese to supply their troops in the south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which passed through southern Laos and northeastern Cambodia. The Thais, with the backing of the US, quietly began to conduct military operations in Laos, to which North Vietnam and China responded by supporting anti-government insurgency in Thailand.
The more the Thais felt threatened by the spread of communism, the more they looked to the Americans for help – by 1968 around 45,000 US military personnel were on Thai soil, which became the base for US bombing raids against North Vietnam and Laos, and for covert operations into Laos and beyond.
The effects of the American presence in Thailand were profound. The economy swelled with dollars, and hundreds of thousands of Thais became reliant on the Americans for a living, with a consequent proliferation of corruption and prostitution. What’s more, the sudden exposure to Western culture led many to question traditional Thai values and the political status quo.
The democracy movement and civil unrest
At the same time, poor farmers were becoming disillusioned with their lot, and during the 1960s many turned against the Bangkok government. At the end of 1964, the Communist Party of Thailand and other groups formed a broad left coalition that soon had the support of several thousand insurgents in remote areas of the northeast. By 1967, the problem had spread to Chiang Rai and Nan provinces, and a separate threat had arisen in southern Thailand, involving Muslim dissidents and the Chinese-dominated Communist Party of Malaya.
Thanom was now facing a major security crisis, especially as the war in Vietnam was going badly. In 1969 he held elections which produced a majority for the government party but, still worried about national stability, the general got cold feet. In November 1971 he reimposed repressive military rule, under a triumvirate of himself, his son Colonel Narong and Praphas, who became known as the “Three Tyrants”. However, the 1969 experiment with democracy had heightened expectations of power-sharing among the middle classes, especially in the universities. Student demonstrations began in June 1973, and in October as many as 500,000 people turned out at Thammasat University in Bangkok to demand a new constitution. King Bhumibol intervened with apparent success, and indeed the demonstrators were starting to disperse on the morning of October 14, when the police tried to control the flow of people away. Tensions quickly mounted and soon a full-scale riot was under way, during which over 350 people were reported killed. The army, however, refused to provide enough troops to control the situation, and later the same day, Thanom, Narong and Praphas were forced to resign and leave the country.
In a new climate of openness, Kukrit Pramoj managed to form a coalition of seventeen elected parties and secured a promise of US withdrawal from Thailand, but his government was riven with feuding. Meanwhile, the king and much of the middle class, alarmed at the unchecked radicalism of the students, began to support new, often violent, right-wing organizations. In October 1976, the students demonstrated again, protesting against the return of Thanom to Thailand to become a monk at Wat Bowonniwet. Supported by elements of the military and the government, the police and reactionary students launched a massive assault on Thammasat University. On October 6, hundreds of students were brutally beaten, scores were lynched and some even burnt alive; the military took control and suspended the constitution.
Soon after, the military-appointed prime minister, Thanin Kraivichien, imposed rigid censorship and forced dissidents to undergo anti-communist indoctrination, but his measures seem to have been too repressive even for the military, who forced him to resign in October 1977. General Kriangsak Chomanand took over, and began to break up the insurgency with shrewd offers of amnesty. His power base was weak, however, and although Kriangsak won the elections of 1979, he was displaced in February 1980 by General Prem Tinsulanonda, who was backed by a broad parliamentary coalition.
Untainted by corruption, Prem achieved widespread support, including that of the monarchy. Parliamentary elections in 1983 returned the military to power and legitimized Prem’s rule. Overseeing a period of strong foreign investment and rapid economic growth, the general maintained the premiership until 1988, with a unique mixture of dictatorship and democracy sometimes called Premocracy: although never standing for parliament himself, Prem was asked by the legislature after every election to become prime minister. He eventually stepped down (though he remains a powerful privy councillor) because, he said, it was time for the country’s leader to be chosen from among its elected representatives.
The 1992 demonstrations and the 1997 constitution
The new prime minister was indeed an elected MP, Chatichai Choonhavan, a retired general with a long civilian career in public office. He pursued a vigorous policy of economic development, but this fostered widespread corruption, in which members of the government were often implicated. Following an economic downturn and Chatichai’s attempts to downgrade the political role of the military, the armed forces staged a bloodless coup on February 23, 1991, led by Supreme Commander Sunthorn and General Suchinda, the army commander-in-chief, who became premier.
When Suchinda reneged on promises to make democratic amendments to the constitution, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Thais poured onto the streets around Bangkok’s Democracy Monument in mass demonstrations between May 17 and 20, 1992. Hopelessly misjudging the mood of the country, Suchinda brutally crushed the protests, leaving hundreds dead or injured. Having justified the massacre on the grounds that he was protecting the king from communist agitators, Suchinda was forced to resign when King Bhumibol expressed his disapproval in a ticking-off that was broadcast on world television.
Elections were held in September, with the Democrat Party, led by Chuan Leekpai, a noted upholder of democracy and the rule of law, emerging victorious. Chuan was succeeded in turn by Banharn Silpa-archa – nicknamed by the local press “the walking ATM”, a reference to his reputation for buying votes – and General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh. The most significant positive event of the latter’s tenure was the approval of a new constitution in 1997. Drawn up by an independent drafting assembly, its main points included: direct elections to the senate, rather than appointment of senators by the prime minister; acceptance of the right of assembly as the basis of a democratic society and guarantees of individual rights and freedoms; greater public accountability; and increased popular participation in local administration. The eventual aim of the new charter was to end the traditional system of patronage, vested interests and vote buying.
Tom yam kung: the 1997 economic crisis
In February 1997 foreign-exchange dealers began to mount speculative attacks on the baht, alarmed at the size of Thailand’s private foreign debt – 250 billion baht in the unproductive property sector alone, much of it accrued through the proliferation of prestigious skyscrapers in Bangkok. Chavalit’s government defended the pegged exchange rate, spending $23 billion of the country’s formerly healthy foreign-exchange reserves, but at the beginning of July was forced to give up the ghost – the baht was floated and soon went into freefall. Thailand was obliged to seek help from the IMF, which in August put together a $17-billion rescue package, coupled with severe austerity measures.
In November, the inept Chavalit was replaced by Chuan Leekpai, who immediately took a hard line in following the IMF’s advice, which involved maintaining cripplingly high interest rates to protect the baht and slashing government budgets. Although this played well abroad, at home the government encountered increasing hostility from its newly impoverished citizens – the downturn struck with such speed and severity that it was dubbed the tom yam kung crisis, after the searingly hot Thai soup. Chuan’s tough stance paid off, however, with the baht stabilizing and inflation falling back.
The general election of January 2001 was the first to be held under the 1997 constitution, which was intended to take vote-buying out of politics. However, this election coincided with the emergence of a new party, Thai Rak Thai (“Thai Loves Thai”), formed by one of Thailand’s wealthiest men, Thaksin Shinawatra, an ex-policeman who had made a personal fortune from government telecommunications concessions.
Thaksin duly won the election, but instead of moving towards greater democracy, as envisaged by the new constitution, he began to apply commercial and legal pressure to try to silence critics in the media and parliament. As his standing became more firmly entrenched, he rejected constitutional reforms designed to rein in his power – famously declaring that “democracy is only a tool” for achieving other goals.
Thaksin did, however, maintain his reputation as a reformer by carrying through nearly all of his election promises. He issued a three-year loan moratorium for perennially indebted farmers and set up a one-million-baht development fund for each of the country’s seventy thousand villages. To improve public health access, a standard charge of B30 per hospital visit was introduced nationwide.
Despite a sharp escalation of violence in the Islamic southern provinces in early 2004, Thaksin breezed through the February 2005 election, becoming the first prime minister in Thai history to win an outright majority at the polls but causing alarm among a wide spectrum of Thailand’s elites. When Thaksin’s relatives sold their shares in the family’s Shin Corporation in January 2006 for $1.7 billion, without paying tax, tens of thousands of mostly middle-class Thais flocked to Bangkok to take part in protracted demonstrations, under the umbrella of the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD). After further allegations of corruption and cronyism, in September Thaksin, while on official business in the United States, was ousted by a military coup.
Thaksin set up home in London, but his supporters, now the People’s Power Party (PPP), won the December 2007 general election. In response, the PAD – its nationalist and royalist credentials and its trademark yellow shirts (the colour of the king) now firmly established – restarted its mass protests.
Matters came to a head in November and December 2008: the PAD seized and closed down Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport; the ruling People’s Power Party was declared illegal by the courts; and Pheu Thai, the PPP’s swift reincarnation, found itself unable to form a new coalition government. Instead, led by the Eton- and Oxford-educated Abhisit Vejjajiva, the Democrat Party jumped into bed with the Bhumjaithai Party, formerly staunch supporters of Thaksin, to take the helm.
This in turn prompted Thaksin’s supporters – now red-shirted and organized into the UDD (United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship) – to hold mass protest meetings. In March 2009, Thaksin claimed by video broadcast that Privy Council President, Prem Tinsulanonda, had masterminded the 2006 coup and Abhisit’s appointment as prime minister, and called for the overthrow of the amat (elite).
Amid a clampdown by the Democrat government on free speech, including heavy-handed use of Article 112, the lèse majesté law, much more violent protests took place early the following year. Calling on Abhisit to hold new elections, thousands of red shirts set up a heavily defended camp around the Ratchaprasong intersection in central Bangkok in early April. On May 19, Abhisit sent in the army to break up the camp by force; altogether 91 people died on both sides in the two months of protests.
Mass popular support for Thaksin, however, did not wane, and in the general election of May 2011, Pheu Thai – now led by his younger sister, Yingluck Shinawatra – romped home with an absolute majority.
Thailand’s first woman prime minister, Yingluck proposed an amnesty bill for all those involved in the political turmoils of the last ten years, which would have included wiping out Thaksin’s corruption convictions, thus allowing him to return to Thailand. However, in late 2013 this prompted further mass protests on the streets of Bangkok: led by Suthep Thaugsuban, who resigned his seat as a Democrat Party MP, thousands of nationalists – no longer wearing yellow shirts, but now blowing whistles as their trademark – occupied large areas of the city centre for several months, in an attempt to provoke the military into staging a coup. In May 2014, this duly happened, and was Thailand’s twelfth successful coup d’état in the period of constitutional monarchy since 1932 (not to mention seven failed attempts). The army chief, General Prayut Chan-ocha, installed himself as prime minister, at the head of a military junta known as the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO).
All political gatherings and activities have been banned, politicians, journalists, academics and activists have been imprisoned or have fled abroad and censorship of the media and social media has been greatly tightened (which in turn has fostered broad self-censorship). General elections were initially promised for 2015, but have been postponed repeatedly; the latest proposal is for February 2019, but at the time of writing that too seems about to slip.
In October 2016, the much-revered King Bhumibol passed away, to be succeeded by his 64-year-old son Vajiralongkorn, who spends much of his time in Germany. A year-long nationwide period of mourning followed, until the funeral was held in October 2017; a date for King Vajiralongkorn’s coronation has not yet been set. The new king seems to favour a return to old ways and intervened in the drafting of the new constitution (Thailand’s twentieth charter since 1932) to take direct control of the immense holdings of the Crown Property Bureau (the equivalent of the Royal Household). This constitution also reduces the power of elected politicians while bolstering the power of the military, with provisions for a strong appointed Senate of 250 members and for a prime minister who is not an elected representative. In 2017, Yingluck Shinawatra fled abroad just before she was sentenced to five years in prison for negligence.