Download or read book Bangkok written by Alec Waugh and published by Eland Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bangkok, Alec Waugh has created the most fluent, truthful and affectionate portrait not only of the city, but also of the dynasty and culture which created it. Cutting through confusion and veiled mystery, he unravels the plots, coups, wars, assassinations, invasions and counter-coups of three hundred years of history as if it were this evening's street gossip. This loving description of the genius, fascination and enduring vitality of Thailand is told with Waugh's customary delight in life and sensual appreciation. The story is brought up-to-date with an afterword by Bruce Palling, former Times correspondent in Thailand.
Download or read book A History of Thailand written by Christopher John Baker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-30 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Thailand offers a lively and accessible account of Thailand's political, economic, social and cultural history. This book explores how a world of mandarin nobles and unfree peasants was transformed and examines how the monarchy managed the foundation of a new nation-state at the turn of the twentieth century. The authors capture the clashes between various groups in their attempts to take control of the nation-state in the twentieth century. They track Thailand's economic changes through an economic boom, globalisation and the evolution of mass society. This edition sheds light on Thailand's recent political, social and economic developments, covering the coup of 2006, the violent street politics of May 2010, and the landmark election of 2011 and its aftermath. It shows how in Thailand today, the monarchy, the military, business and new mass movements are players in a complex conflict over the nature and future of the country's democracy.
Download or read book A Regional Economic History of Thailand written by Porphant Ouyyanont and published by ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an economic history of Bangkok, the Central Region, the North, the South, and Northeastern Regions from the signing of the Bowring Treaty in 1855 to the present. Most research has focused on Bangkok as the centre of change affecting other regions and has neglected other regions that had an influence on Bangkok. This book however looks at the changes not only in Bangkok, but also in the other regions, and emphasizes the ways in which Bangkok had an impact on the other regions, and how changes in the other regions affected Bangkok. It also looks, in turn, at each of the principal regions, and concentrate on the long-term economic and social changes and the various forces which promoted the changes.
Download or read book Brief History of Thailand written by Richard A. Ruth and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thailand is known for its picturesque beaches and famous temples, but there's much more to this popular holiday destination than many realize. A Brief History of Thailand offers an engaging look at the country's last 250 years--from coups and violent massacres to the invention of Pad Thai in the 1930's. Readers will learn the vibrant story of Thailand's emergence as a prosperous Buddhist state, its transformation from traditional kingdom to democratic constitutional monarchy and its subsequent rise to prominence in Southeast Asian affairs. Thailand's dramatic history spans centuries of conflict, and this book recounts many of these fascinating episodes, including: The true story of Anna Leonowens, the British governess hired to teach the children of King Mongkut, fictionalized in Margaret Landon's bestselling novel Anna and the King of Siam and turned into a hit Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and film, The King and I The bloodless Siamese Revolution of 1932 that established overnight the first constitutional monarchy in Asia, ending almost eight centuries of absolute rule and creating a democratic system of parliamentary government The Japanese invasion of Thailand and construction of the "Bridge Over the River Kwai" made famous by the novel and Oscar-winning film The mysterious death of King Ananda Mahidol, murdered in his bed in 1946, and a source of controversy ever since The development of Thailand as an international playground during the Vietnam War, when American military used it as rowdy destination for servicemen on furlough The 70-year reign of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world's longest-serving monarch, who was born in the U.S., educated in Switzerland, loved to play the saxophone and was idolized by his people With this book, historian and professor Richard A. Ruth has skillfully crafted an accessible cultural and political history of an understudied nation. Covering events through the King's death in 2016, A Brief History of Thailand will be of interest to students, travelers and anyone hoping to learn more about this part of the world.
Download or read book Bangkok Utopia written by Lawrence Chua and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-02-28 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Utopia” is a word not often associated with the city of Bangkok, which is better known for its disorderly sprawl, overburdened roads, and stifling levels of pollution. Yet as early as 1782, when the city was officially founded on the banks of the Chao Phraya river as the home of the Chakri dynasty, its orientation was based on material and rhetorical considerations that alluded to ideal times and spaces. The construction of palaces, monastic complexes, walls, forts, and canals created a defensive network while symbolically locating the terrestrial realm of the king within the Theravada Buddhist cosmos. Into the twentieth century, pictorial, narrative, and built representations of utopia were critical to Bangkok’s transformation into a national capital and commercial entrepôt. But as older representations of the universe encountered modern architecture, building technologies, and urban planning, new images of an ideal society attempted to reconcile urban-based understandings of Buddhist liberation and felicitous states like nirvana with worldly models of political community like the nation-state. Bangkok Utopia outlines an alternative genealogy of both utopia and modernism in a part of the world that has often been overlooked by researchers of both. It examines representations of utopia that developed in the city—as expressed in built forms as well as architectural drawings, building manuals, novels, poetry, and ecclesiastical murals—from its first general strike of migrant laborers in 1910 to the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1973. Using Thai- and Chinese-language archival sources, the book demonstrates how the new spaces of the city became arenas for modern subject formation, utopian desires, political hegemony, and social unrest, arguing that the modern city was a space of antinomy—one able not only to sustain heterogeneous temporalities, but also to support conflicting world views within the urban landscape. By underscoring the paradoxical character of utopias and their formal narrative expressions of both hope and hegemony, Bangkok Utopia provides an innovative way to conceptualize the uneven economic development and fractured political conditions of contemporary global cities.
Download or read book Bang Chan written by Lauriston Sharp and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bang Chan traces the changing cultural characteristics of a small Siamese village during the century and a quarter from its founding as a wilderness settlement outside Bangkok to its absorption into the urban spread of the Thai capital. Rich in ethnographic detail, the book sums up the major findings of a pioneering interdisciplinary research project that began in 1948. Changes in Bang Chan's social organization, technology, economy, governance, education, and religion are portrayed in the context of local and national developments.
Download or read book A History of Ayutthaya written by Chris Baker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full history of a great commercial and political center that rose in Asia over almost five centuries.
Download or read book King of Bangkok written by Claudio Sopranzetti and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The English translation of this best-selling graphic novel tells the story of Nok, an old blind man who sells lottery tickets in Bangkok, as he decides to leave the city and return to his native village. Through reflections on contemporary Bangkok and flashbacks to his past, Nok reconstructs a journey through the slums of migrant workers, the rice fields of Isaan, the tourist villages of Ko Pha Ngan, and the Red Shirt protests of 2010. Based on a decade of anthropological research, The King of Bangkok is a story of migration to the city, distant families in the countryside, economic development eroding the land, and violent political protest. Ultimately, it is a story about contemporary Thailand and how the waves of history lift, engulf, and crash against ordinary people.
Download or read book The Ambiguous Allure of the West written by Rachel V. Harrison and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ambiguous Allure of the West examines the impact of Western imperialism on Thai cultural development from the 1850s to the present and highlights the value of postcolonial analysis for studying the ambiguities, inventions, and accommodations with the West that continue to enrich Thai culture. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Thais have adopted and adapted aspects of Western culture and practice in an ongoing relationship that may be characterized as semicolonial. As they have done so, the notions of what constitutes "Thainess" have been inflected by Western influence in complex and ambiguous ways, producing nuanced, hybridized Thai identities.The Ambiguous Allure of the West brings together Thai and Western scholars of history, anthropology, film, and literary and cultural studies to analyze how the protean Thai self has been shaped by the traces of the colonial Western Other. Thus, the book draws the study of Siam/Thailand into the critical field of postcolonial theory, expanding the potential of Thai Studies to contribute to wider debates in the region and in the disciplines of cultural studies and critical theory. The chapters in this book present the first sustained dialogue between Thai cultural studies and postcolonial analysis.By clarifying the distinctive position of semicolonial societies such as Thailand in the Western-dominated world order, this book bridges and integrates studies of former colonies with studies of the Asian societies that retained their political independence while being economically and culturally subordinated to Euro-American power.
Download or read book Pen and Sail written by Nithi ʻĪeosīwong and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nidhi Eoseewong is the most innovative, famed, and controversial Thai historian of his generation. This book founded his reputation and is the first of his major works to appear in English. On its publication in Thai, he was immediately hailed as "a major historian, the most capable of the present era." Pen and Sail combines intellectual history and economic history. Nidhi argues that the emergence of a market economy in the early Bangkok era (1782-1855) was the driving force behind a major change in mentality and worldview seen in poetry, early prose works, biographies of the Buddha, scripts for chanting the Jataka tales, language primers, manuals of behavior, and revisions of the royal chronicles. Nidhi Eoseewong's outstanding career as a historian and leading public intellectual was recognized by award of the prestigious Fukuoka Asia Prize in 2000.
Download or read book Bangkok Wakes to Rain written by Pitchaya Sudbanthad and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A house in the center of Bangkok becomes the point of confluence where lives are shaped by upheaval, memory, and the lure of home. Witness to two centuries' flux in one of the world's most restless cities, a house plays host to longings and losses past, present, and future. A nineteenth-century missionary doctor pines for the comforts of New England even as he finds the vibrant foreign chaos of Siam increasingly difficult to resist. A post-war society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting the course of her future. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1970s to conjure music that will pacify resident spirits, even as he's haunted by ghosts of his former life. Not long after, a young woman gives swimming lessons in the luxury condos that have eclipsed the old house, trying to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in the post-submergence Bangkok of the future, a band of savvy teenagers guides tourists and former residents past waterlogged, ruined landmarks, selling them tissues to wipe their tears for places they themselves do not remember. Time collapses as these stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Siamese Melting Pot written by Edward Van Roy and published by Flipside Digital Content Company Inc.. This book was released on 2018-02-14 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethnic minorities historically comprised a solid majority of Bangkok's population. They played a dominant role in the city's exuberant economic and social development. In the shadow of Siam's prideful, flamboyant Thai ruling class, the city's diverse minorities flourished quietly. The Thai-Portuguese; the Mon; the Lao; the Cham, Persian, Indian, Malay, and Indonesian Muslims; and the Taechiu, Hokkien, Hakka, Hainanese, and Cantonese Chinese speech groups were particularly important. Others, such as the Khmer, Vietnamese, Thai Yuan, Sikhs, and Westerners, were smaller in numbers but no less significant in their influence on the city's growth and prosperity. In tracing the social, political, and spatial dynamics of Bangkok's ethnic pluralism through the two-and-a-half centuries of the city's history, this book calls attention to a long-neglected mainspring of Thai urban development. While the book's primary focus is on the first five reigns of the Chakri dynasty (1782-1910), the account extends backward and forward to reveal the continuing impact of Bangkok's ethnic minorities on Thai culture change, within the broader context of Thai development studies. It provides an exciting perspective and unique resource for anyone interested in exploring Bangkok's evolving cultural milieu or Thailand's modern history.
Download or read book Thailand written by David K. Wyatt and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly acclaimed book, the standard history of Thailand for almost twenty years, has now been completely revised by the author. David K. Wyatt has also added new sections examining the social and economic changes that have transformed the country in the past two decades. Praise for the previous edition: "Wyatt knows his subject well enough and has enough enthusiasm for it to make his book . . . entertaining as well as eminently educational."--David McElveen, Asiaweek "A very readable account. . . .We come away from reading it with a clearer understanding of where Thailand stands in relation to its neighbors, who the Thai people are, how the Thai government evolved into its present form."--James Stent, Asian Wall Street Journal "Concise, thorough, and readable."--John Gabree, New York Newsday
Download or read book Thailand History Politics and the Rule of Law 2nd Edition written by James Wise and published by Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd. This book was released on 2024-02-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thailand’s 2023 election results energised some Thais and traumatised others. Voters and analysts alike were astonished that a youthful party aiming to transform the country won the most seats, though not a majority. The Move Forward party wanted to de-militarise society and politics, de-centralise government administration, de-monopolise the economy, and curb the ideological, political, and financial power of the monarchy. For decades, Thai politics had revolved around two big questions: Do you support the charismatic Thaksin Shinawatra and his populist Pheu Thai party? Do you support military supervision of politics? Thaksin and the military—once enemies—now had a common foe. Relying on military-appointed senators, they formed a coalition government that pushed Move Forward into the parliamentary opposition. Move Forward’s challenge is to broaden support for its progressive agenda before the next election. That’s a scary prospect for Thaksin and the military because, according to the current constitution, next time they won’t be able to rely on unelected senators to rescue them. The revised edition of this book describes the historical context of these momentous events and trends and shares insights into the social and cultural undercurrents that shape Thai politics. Informed by the latest research, it is an accessible introduction for the general reader, while also offering much to those who want to know more about Thailand’s political dynamics.
Download or read book Moments of Silence written by Thongchai Winichakul and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The massacre on October 6, 1976, in Bangkok was brutal and violent, its savagery unprecedented in modern Thai history. Four decades later there has been no investigation into the atrocity; information remains limited, the truth unknown. There has been no collective coming to terms with what happened or who is responsible. Thai society still refuses to confront this dark page in its history. Moments of Silence focuses on the silence that surrounds the October 6 massacre. Silence, the book argues, is not forgetting. Rather it signals an inability to forget or remember—or to articulate a socially meaningful memory. It is the “unforgetting,” the liminal domain between remembering and forgetting. Historian Thongchai Winichakul, a participant in the events of that day, gives the silence both a voice and a history by highlighting the factors that contributed to the unforgetting amidst changing memories of the massacre over the decades that followed. They include shifting political conditions and context, the influence of Buddhism, the royal-nationalist narrative of history, the role played by the monarchy as moral authority and arbiter of justice, and a widespread perception that the truth might have devastating ramifications for Thai society. The unforgetting impacted both victims and perpetrators in different ways. It produced a collective false memory of an incident that never took place, but it also produced silence that is filled with hope and counter-history. Moments of Silence tells the story of a tragedy in Thailand—its victims and survivors—and how Thai people coped when closure was unavailable in the wake of atrocity. But it also illuminates the unforgetting as a phenomenon common to other times and places where authoritarian governments flourish, where atrocities go unexamined, and where censorship (imposed or self-directed) limits public discourse. The tensions inherent in the author’s dual role offer a riveting story, as well as a rare and intriguing perspective. Most of all, this provocative book makes clear the need to provide a place for past wrongs in the public memory.
Download or read book A History of the Thai Chinese written by Jeffery Sng and published by Didier Millet,Csi. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of the Thai-Chinese tells the story of how Chinese emigrants and Thailand each embraced the opportunities afforded by the other.
Download or read book 22 Walks in Bangkok written by Kenneth Barrett and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ING_08 Review quote
