Showing 21 - 30 of 39
Retelling a great Lao-Thai tale
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 22/02/2016
» Sinxay is a story which appears in slightly different versions with slightly different names in Mon, Thai, Lao and Khmer. The plot is a classic quest in which a hero prince is banished by the machinations of evil siblings, travels long through forest and mountain, defeats many fearsome enemies, and is eventually celebrated in a great homecoming. Old versions were written in verse for recitation at festivals. Key scenes were popular with artists painting temple murals. During the nationalist era in the 1940s, the great littérateur of Laos, Maha Sila Viravong, began a prose version in a conscious attempt to create a Lao national literature. More recently, Sinxay has been celebrated as a kind of national hero in Laos. In 2005, Khon Kaen municipality adopted Sinxay as symbol of the city, and characters from the tale sprouted on the peaks of the city's lamp posts.
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.
Bringing the birth stories to life
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 12/10/2015
» The jataka tales or birth stories are the most vivid and accessible part of Buddhist teaching. The Buddha, once he gained the ability to recall his past lives, related all 550 of them to the monks in his following. In some lives, he was a king, some a hermit, some a pauper, and in a few an animal. The 10 longest of these tales became associated with his 10 last lives and with his attainment of the "perfections" that enabled him to be born as the historical Buddha. In this book, this Great Ten have been translated anew for the first time in over a century.
From the field to the protest
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 21/09/2015
» The Thai music known as luk thung (son of the field) is difficult to define because it borrows from everywhere and evolves over time. To the ear, however, it is unmistakable. That's a result of its two dominant rhythms, one from Thai folk music, the other from Latin America and an undercurrent of melancholy from the genre's archetypal song about the country boy far from home thinking of the village and the girl back there. Ethnomusicologist James Mitchell defines it simply as "Thailand's most popular music".
At long last, history is told
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 04/05/2015
» Only a few years ago, the history of Thailand was often expressed as a "Thai race" that migrated down from the north to occupy a seemingly empty land, and then a string of kings defending them from violent neighbours and nasty colonialists. The Thai-Chinese scarcely made an appearance. A History Of Thai-Chinese, however, seeks to redress the balance.
The man behind the treaty
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 27/10/2014
» In Thai history, Bowring is the title of the 1855 treaty that is the major landmark in Siam's transition to the modern world. Bowring is also less well known as the author of a bulky book about Mongkut's Siam (the reign of King Rama IV). But John Bowring himself is like a character in a drama who is there because the plot requires him, but who never takes shape as a person.
Silent no more
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 17/03/2014
» Why have Northeasterners become such enthusiastic supporters for Thaksin Shinawatra, the Pheu Thai party and the red-shirt movement? Charles Keyes first arrived in the Northeast in 1962 as a research student in rural anthropology. After the 2010 crackdown on red shirts in Bangkok, he realised he had to rethink all he had learned and written about the region over the last 48 years. This book is the result.
Decoding a half-century of writing from the Northeast
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 02/12/2013
» Between the mid 1960s and mid 1980s, three of the most acclaimed writers in Thailand came from Isan, the Northeast. As told in Martin Platt's illuminating account, each took up writing in very different circumstances.
Intimate view of an extraordinary life
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 04/11/2013
» The life of ML Boonlua Debyasuvarn slices diagonally across the social history of 20th-century Thailand. She was born in 1911, the 32nd child of a senior noble from a core royal lineage (Kunchon). Her father was keeper of the royal elephants and manager of the royal drama troupe. While the Fifth Reign court ardently pursued modernisation, he remained totally traditional, innocent of English, scarcely literate in Thai, devoted to traditional arts, and polygamous. His drama troupe doubled as a personal harem.
Do rights matter in Thailand?
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 30/09/2013
» Fifteen years ago, "M.56" was spray-painted all over sites of environmental protest like a spell to ward off evil. The clause in the 1997 Constitution that guaranteed the rights of local communities over natural resources bore the number 56. This clause and the formation of the National Human Rights Commission raised great expectations that the authorities would no longer be able to use "development" and "national security" as justification for riding roughshod over local communities. That hope turned out to be somewhat forlorn.