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Charnvit in a nutshell
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 09/11/2015
» In 1973, Charnvit Kasetsiri became the first Thai historian to gain a doctorate from a top-flight American university and have his thesis published by the university press. In the official history of Thailand at the time, Sukhothai was described as the first Thai kingdom, a Golden Age which displayed everything good about Thai civilisation and Thai values. The role of the subsequent Ayutthaya period was to decline from this peak, so that the Bangkok era could be another great era of revival and resurgence. Charnvit's thesis quietly gnawed away the foundations of this national mythology by describing the rise of the Ayutthaya kingdom. He added a series of articles on Ayutthaya's growth into one of the great commercial powers of early modern Asia, and the cradle of the Thailand we know today. One of these articles began with a banner headline "Ayutthaya was the first major political, cultural and commercial center of the Thai". Goodbye Sukhothai.